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Digital Life Seminar

Date: 2025 Fall Semester

When:  Thursdays, 1.25 - 2.40pm (ET). Due to limited space, all guests outside of Cornell Tech are asked to please RSVP beforehand.     

Where: Cornell Tech's Bloomberg Center, Room 161.

Convenors: Helen Nissenbaum and Michael Byrne

Queries: Michael Byrne (mjb556@cornell.edu)

About: The Digital Life Seminar series offers students and guests an opportunity to engage actively with leading scholars and practitioners researching and responding to the development and application of digital technologies.

DLI Seminars | Fall 2025 

Sterling Williams-Ceci  & Matt Franchi

Thursday, October 30, 2025 at 5:25:00 PM UTC

Sterling Williams-Ceci & Matt Franchi

Cornell Tech

"Biased AI Writing Assistants Shift Users' Attitudes on Societal Issues" & "Privacy of Groups in Dense Street Imagery"

"Biased AI Writing Assistants Shift Users' Attitudes on Societal Issues": People are increasingly using AI writing assistants powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide autocomplete suggestions to help them write in various online settings. However, LLMs often reproduce biased viewpoints in their text, and research from psychology has shown that manipulating people’s behavior can, in turn, influence their attitudes. Can writing with biased suggestions from AI writing assistants impact people’s attitudes in this process? — Sterling Williams-Ceci

"Privacy of Groups in Dense Street Imagery": In this work, we find that increased data density and advancements in artificial intelligence enable harmful group membership inferences from purportedly anonymized data. We perform a penetration test to demonstrate how easily sensitive group affiliations can be inferred from obfuscated pedestrians in 25,232,608 dashcam images taken in New York City. We develop a typology of identifiable groups within DSI and analyze implications for privacy and public space through the lens of contextual integrity. — Matt Franchi

Alicia Solow-Niederman

Thursday, November 6, 2025 at 6:25:00 PM UTC

Alicia Solow-Niederman

George Washington University Law School

Beyond the Supply Chain: Artificial Intelligence’s Demand Side

AI governance underscores the AI “supply chain” and the “many hands” involved in the production of AI systems. Even when it addresses downstream risks, the focus remains on AI's producers. Although invaluable and important, this production-centered approach risks overlooking what happens when real people use AI tools. This paper identifies and theorizes AI governance’s missing half, which I call the “demand side.”

Amy Brand

Thursday, November 13, 2025 at 6:25:00 PM UTC

Amy Brand

MIT Press, Director and Publisher

The Future of Knowledge and Publishing

The rise of large language models (LLMs) is reshaping knowledge production, raising urgent questions for research communication and publishing writ large. Drawing on qualitative survey responses from over 850 academic book authors from across a range of fields and institutions, we highlight widespread concern about the unlicensed use of in-copyright scientific and scholarly publications for AI training. Most authors are not opposed to generative AI, but they strongly favor consent, attribution, and compensation as conditions for use of their work.

Corona

Previous Seminars

For more information about our past list of seminar speakers, see the DLI Seminar Archive >

To watch previous seminar series, visit our DLI Media Channel >

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