An Interview with AI Expert Michael Bennett of Northeastern University

Our guest is Michael Bennett, director of education curriculum and business lead for responsible AI at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University. Bennett, a practicing lawyer, holds a law degree from Harvard Law School and a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic University in Philosophy -- Science, Technology and Society. Bennett is also an occasional TechTarget contributing writer.

During the 45-minute episode, Bennett discusses the impact of New York City's new Law 144 governing the use of AI in automated employment decision tools, which he helped draft before it went into effect on July 5, 2023. The local law is likely to have a wide-reaching effect on employers across the U.S. if only because a large number of corporations are based in or have a significant presence in the country's largest city, Bennett says.

The law prohibits "employers and employment agencies from using an automated employment decision tool unless the tool has been subject to a bias audit within one year of the use of the tool, information about the bias audit is publicly available, and certain notices have been provided to employees or job candidates." Law 144 has already spun off a thriving new niche of law and audit firms providing services to employers to comply with the measure,

Bennett also zeroes in on the hottest topic in the tech world at the moment: generative AI. He talks about various efforts, including projects he's involved in, to rein in, regulate and harness for effective use large language models and the AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google Bard that have become ubiquitous in the business and consumer spheres over the last year.

On another front, AI and the arts, Bennett discusses the latest developments in copyright law as it relates to AI and also touches on the Hollywood TV writers strike and writers' concerns about generative AI systems taking over their jobs.

Podcast intro/outro music by Six Umbrellas: "Joker." This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.