CITP Lecture: "The Societal Impact of Foundation Models"

Foundation models (ChatGPT, StableDiffusion) are transforming society: remarkable capabilities, serious risks, rampant deployment, unprecedented adoption, overflowing funding, and unending controversy. In this talk, we will center our attention on their societal impact. In the first half, we will discuss two efforts (HELM, Ecosystem Graphs) to ensure their transparency through standardized public reporting. In the second half, we will talk about work-in-progress to understand unique dimensions of their harms (monoculture and homogenization) as well as mechanisms to drive change. Overall, the goal is for the talk to be high-tempo and broad-coverage to stimulate discussion on what we should do!