Meredith Ringel Morris: Generative AI's HCI Moment

Episode 138
I spoke with Meredith Morris (x.com/merrierm) about:
* The intersection of AI and HCI and why we need more cross-pollination between AI and adjacent fields
* Disability studies and AI
* Generative ghosts and technological determinism
* Developing a useful definition of AGI
I didn’t get to record an intro for this episode since I’ve been sick.
Enjoy!
Meredith is Director for Human-AI Interaction Research for Google DeepMind (research.google/people/MeredithRingelMorris) and an Affiliate Professor in The Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and in The Information School at the University of Washington, where she participates in the dub.washington.edu research consortium. Her work spans the areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), human-centered AI, human-AI interaction, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), social computing, and accessibility. She has been recognized as an ACM Fellow (awards.acm.org/award-recipients/morris_6317538) and ACM SIGCHI Academy member (sigchi.org/awards/sigchi-award-recipients/2020…) for her contributions to HCI.
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Outline:
* (00:00) Meredith’s influences and earlier work
* (03:00) Distinctions between AI and HCI
* (05:56) Maturity of fields and cross-disciplinary work
* (09:03) Technology and ends
* (10:37) Unique aspects of Meredith’s research direction
* (12:55) Forms of knowledge production in interdisciplinary work
* (14:08) Disability, Bias, and AI
* (18:32) LaMPost and using LMs for writing
* (20:12) Accessibility approaches for dyslexia
* (22:15) Awareness of AI and perceptions of autonomy
* (24:43) The software model of personhood
* (28:07) Notions of intelligence, normative visions and disability studies
* (32:41) Disability categories and learning systems
* (37:24) Bringing more perspectives into CS research and re-defining what counts as CS research
* (39:36) Training interdisciplinary researchers, blurring boundaries in academia and industry
* (43:25) Generative Agents and public imagination
* (45:13) The state of ML conferences, the need for more cross-pollination
* (46:42) Prestige in conferences, the move towards more cross-disciplinary work
* (48:52) Joon Park Appreciation
* (49:51) Training interdisciplinary researchers
* (53:20) Generative Ghosts and technological determinism
* (57:06) Examples of generative ghosts and clones, relationships to agentic systems
* (1:00:39) Reasons for wanting generative ghosts
* (1:02:25) Questions of consent for generative clones and ghosts
* (1:05:01) Labor involved in maintaining generative ghosts, psychological tolls
* (1:06:25) Potential religious and spiritual significance of generative systems
* (1:10:19) Anthropomorphization
* (1:12:14) User experience and cognitive biases
* (1:15:24) Levels of AGI
* (1:16:13) Defining AGI
* (1:23:20) World models and AGI
* (1:26:16) Metacognitive abilities in AGI
* (1:30:06) Towards Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment
* (1:30:55) Pluralistic value alignment
* (1:32:43) Meredith’s perspective on deploying AI systems
* (1:36:09) Meredith’s advice for younger interdisciplinary researchers
Links:
* Meredith’s homepage (cs.stanford.edu/~merrie), Twitter (x.com/merrierm), and Google Scholar (scholar.google.com/citations?user=eJsW6W8AAAAJ…)
* Papers
* Mediating Group Dynamics through Tabletop Interface Design (cs.stanford.edu/~merrie/papers/morris_ieee_cga…)
* SearchTogether: An Interface for Collaborative Web Search (cs.stanford.edu/~merrie/papers/searchtogether.…)
* AI and Accessibility: A Discussion of Ethical Considerations (arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1908/1908.08939.pdf)
* Disability, Bias, and AI (ainowinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/…)
* LaMPost: Design and Evaluation of an AI-assisted Email Writing Prototype for Adults with Dyslexia (cs.stanford.edu/~merrie/papers/LaMPost.pdf)
* Generative Ghosts (arxiv.org/pdf/2402.01662.pdf)
* Levels of AGI (arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462.pdf)

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