AGE OF AI PODCAST
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Maria Santacaterina and Medlir discuss the impact of generative AI on businesses. They ask the question whether the massive financial investment in generative AI will pay off for these businesses. Is the promise of AI, hype or real?

In July 2024, Japan’s Ministry of Defense unveiled its first basic policy document on the use of artificial intelligence and a comprehensive strategy to enhance Japan’s cyber defense capabilities. In this episode Dr. Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi of the University of Tokyo, joins us to talk about how AI fits into Japan’s military strategy.

Medlir sits down with Dr. Paige Arthur, Director of Global Programming at Columbia Global, and co-author of AI for Peace (with Branka Panic), to discuss how recent AI innovations can contribute to conflict prevention and peace. They also explore the opportunities and challenges that technologies pose for human rights and curbing hate speech.

This week is our annual Diogenes Awards, where we look at AI in film and television (and sometimes other amusing tangents). We discuss the content that we enjoyed over the last 18 months, and that we think our audience will enjoy the most. We also give our top recommendation in each category.

Chris talks with Mihalis Kritikos of the European Commission on Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Trustworthy Governance of AI. Mihalis sheds light on how he got started working on AI governance during the Covid-19 pandemic, the ethics of AI, the EU AI Act, and also AI surveillance in the workplace.

Chris talks to Maya Sobchuk, GGI Non-Resident Fellow and Researcher at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo about her work on AI and disinformation. In this episode Maya reflects on the history of Russian disinformation campaigns against Ukraine, disinformation in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and how Ukraine has harnessed its AI know-how and innovation space to counter disinformation.

Medlir is joined by Dr. Hannes Mueller to discuss recent developments in conflict prevention. Specifically, we examine how artificial intelligence can help governments detect risk early, predict the likelihood of new conflicts, and prevent older ones from re-emerging.

For our season opener, Young Diogenes has a chat with Chris and Medlir about some cool new things large language models can now do for us. Specifically, why some companies, like Google with Gemini, are choosing to concentrate on increasingly larger context windows (i.e., the size of the text, music, video prompt, etc., that the AI can parse). And why being able to load an entire book, a movie, or your entire life into the prompt and then have a conversation about these things, might be useful.

Medlir asks Lukas Andriukaitis, Board member of Lithuania-based Civic Resilience Initiative (CRI), what it means to work and live at the frontier of the new misinformation / disinformation space. They discuss the current atmosphere in the region and beyond, in terms of threat of misinformation/disinformation. They consider both the benefits and the drawbacks of AI-enabled technologies as billions across the world prepare to cast their votes in 2024.

Luca Bertuzzi joins Medlir for a discussion on the EU AI Act passed by the European Parliament on March 13th. Among other things, they discuss the likely impact of the law on innovation and governance within the EU and abroad, as well as criticisms that the act fails to address concerns regarding human rights and civil liberties.