Junior Workshop Highlights

The inspiration: I knew I wanted to do something with philosophy and had been reading a lot about artificial intelligence (AI). I learned AI was affecting fields I hadn't considered, like how AI art-generated images are biased because of the data that trains them. With Chat GPT becoming more relevant and humans becoming more reliant on AI, I think it is important to consider the greater impact and how our quality of life could deteriorate. I wanted to know what we could program into AI, what we could program out of AI, and what restrictions we could place on its usage to make it more ethical.

The process: For the first couple of weeks, I was researching. I read Aristotle's The Nicomachean Ethics and a number of scholarly papers, in addition to watching videos. I wanted to research all kinds of sources with different viewpoints to help me formulate an argument. Once I had all components, I started writing – outlining sections and adding in bullet points. I didn't expect the revision process to be so prominent, but it was a really important part of the project. My Junior Workshop advisor helped me with proofreading and checking ideas, and it was really easy to run things by her. I set my own deadlines and had flexibility around how I structured my time. Throughout the project, my vision stayed the same, but what I was going to write completely changed as I found a better course of action.

What I learned: This project emphasized the importance of being thorough and building in enough time to revise. Through this experience I had the opportunity to write a longer paper (the end result was nineteen pages in total) and how to break up the project into smaller chunks I could work on consistently. I learned to gather all kinds of sources and keep an open mind as I approach a research project. 

What's next: I plan to continue my research and pursue more things related to AI. I've already interviewed others in the field and intend to keep going. In undergrad, I want to study math, computer science, philosophy, linguistics – all sorts of topics that will help me learn more about AI and see if we can improve upon it. I know my plans for the future can't be rigid; in five years AI will be something totally different.