5 Questions for Jay Stanley

Jay Stanley is the resident futurist at the American Civil Liberties Union. Asked what technology he thinks is overhyped, he said, "Obviously, the big question today is whether large language models and generative AI are overhyped. It’s certainly overhyped in the sense that it’s being deployed where it’s really not ready for prime time. Because it hasn’t been fully vetted in terms of its fairness, effectiveness and bias, it’s being used to replace humans in ways that degrade services for people. It makes decisions about human beings that have consequences for their lives. It can be decisions in housing, employment, lending, assistance benefits. [AI systems] are very opaque—their behavior depends on numerous variables that the public may not have access to, such as the content of the training data, the code that was used to train the AI. If decisions are being made about people, they have a right to know how [the decisions] are being made, what criteria are being used."