About the seminar
The rise of generative AI powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked both excitement and worries. While these models are surprisingly effective in helping people solve their problems, they also raise ethical questions about manipulation, bias, and AI potentially controlling humans. At the core of these debates is the question: What drives AI? Do these models have goals or values, and if so, which values do they reflect?
This seminar will argue that LLMs do not have overall goals, that it would be unwise to program such goals into them, and unlikely for them to develop such goals on their own. However, AI cannot avoid having values, in the sense of distinguishing between “good” and “bad” responses to a prompt. These values are shaped by the collective attitudes embedded in the human-generated texts and feedback they are trained on—implicitly encoding societal values and common biases. Understanding these underlying values is crucial for guiding AI development in a beneficial direction. The seminar will suggest a conceptual framework and method for mapping the implicit values embedded in generative AI systems.
About the speaker
Francis Heylighen is a VUB professor and research director of CLEA. The main focus of his research is the origin and evolution of complex and in particular, intelligent organizations. How do systems emerge, self-organize, adapt and achieve some form of cognition? Heylighen approaches these problems starting from an ontology of actions or processes: the building blocks of reality are not material particles or "things", but interactions. Systems are then merely self-maintaining networks of processes, as elegantly modelled by the formalism of COT. Francis Heylighen has worked in particular on the development of collective intelligence or distributed cognition and its application to the emerging 'global brain'. He has also been looking at how individual agents tackle challenges via action, exploration, and learning, and how their interactions become coordinated via connectionist networks and stigmergy.
Practical
This seminar is taking place on campus (not online) and is open to everyone interested.
When. Friday March 14, 2025 at 14h30 - 16h30
Where. VUB campus Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Elsene - Building C Room 4.09 (4th floor)
