ChatGPT per tutti, artificial intelligence in the East Campus

The Università della Svizzera italiana established itself as one of the places to discuss Artificial Intelligence on Friday afternoon, combining cutting-edge academic research with a focus on ethical and social issues and communication. The ChatGPT per tutti meeting, in the multi-purpose hall of the East Campus Lugano, was attended by a large audience of all ages. Presenting the popular application developed by OpenAI were Professor Luca Maria Gambardella, a leading international expert in artificial intelligence, and Andrea Scarinci of Lugano Living Lab.

Following an introduction on the development of artificial intelligence and the various technologies available, Professor Gambardella focused on deep learning, a system also used by ChatGPT: an artificial neural network that learns from large amounts of data how to perform certain tasks, such as writing texts or answering questions. Sometimes it occurs that the training data contains prejudices or discrimination that are then incorporated into the system but, as Professor Gambardella stated, artificial intelligence does not create these prejudices but, on the contrary, helps to highlight them.

At the Università della Svizzera italiana, these topics are studied in depth not only from a technological point of view, but also with regard to ethical, social and philosophical implications. Professor Gambardella concluded his talk by pointing out two possible risks: on the one hand, laziness in delegating more and more tasks to ChatGPT and similar systems; on the other hand, the loss of critical sense towards information. Risks that were also at the centre of Andrea Scarinci's demonstrations that showed how relatively easy it is to have ChatGPT write texts containing false and absurd information, also bypassing the filters introduced by the developers.