Begin­ning of June 2024, Prof. Dr. Olaf Kramer and Anna Köhler will travel to the inter­na­tion­al Ecsite con­fer­ence in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

At the inter­na­tion­al "AI Spot­light Show­case" on Thursday, June 6th, each speak­er will have sev­en minutes to present their top­ic. The event brings togeth­er the­or­ists and prac­ti­tion­ers from around the world to exchange ideas and inspire each oth­er. Top­ics range from Andreas Matt's I AM A.I. – com­mu­nic­at­ing core con­cepts of AI to Jen­nifer Wong's AI: Who’s Look­ing After Me? At Sci­ence Gal­lery Lon­don and Olivi­er Bielecki's AI-powered trans­la­tion at Uni­ver­science. A list of all top­ics is noted here.

In this light­ning round, Anna Köhler from the RHET AI Centre intro­duces the read­ing series "A Dif­fer­ent Look at AI", organ­ised and con­duc­ted by Unit 4 of the RHET AI Centre. These read­ings took place in Tübin­gen on three occa­sions: Unsere Arbeit­swelt [Our Work­ing World] with Ber­it Glanz, Täuschung [Decep­tion] with Tom Hil­len­brand, and Schöne Neue Tex­twelt? [Brave New Text World?] with Jörg Piringer. The even­ings con­sisted of read­ings fol­lowed by expert dis­cus­sions, with the audi­ence par­ti­cip­at­ing via Men­ti­meter. The selec­ted lit­er­at­ure aimed to make the com­plex top­ic of AI more access­ible and stim­u­late discussions.

In her present­a­tion, Anna Köhler reflects on this approach and explains how the data col­lec­ted via Men­ti­meter were used to shape future read­ings and oth­er sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion formats. The ana­lysed data­sets helped to bet­ter under­stand the asso­ci­ations and atti­tudes of vis­it­ors towards AI top­ics. We aim to explore the bene­fits of this inter­activ­ity to foster dia­logue among participants.

Fol­low­ing the light­ning round, there will be anoth­er pan­el of approx­im­ately one hour, themed "Keep­ing Our Fin­gers on the Pulse of AI", where some of the pro­jects can be fur­ther dis­cussed, includ­ing "A Dif­fer­ent Look at AI" from the RHET AI Centre.

This pan­el aims to reflect on the chal­lenge of assess­ing the impact of AI. AI is deeply integ­rated into our glob­al real­ity with both pos­it­ive and uncer­tain out­comes. The cent­ral ques­tion is wheth­er we should crit­ic­ally eval­u­ate the applic­a­tion of AI or explore its untapped poten­tial — and wheth­er such con­sid­er­a­tions might come too late giv­en the rap­id tech­no­lo­gic­al devel­op­ment. Or is AI just a tem­por­ary tool, whose hype will dimin­ish once we intro­duce new­er, super­i­or technologies?