Parents and teachers across the world are rejoicing as students have returned to classrooms. But unbeknownst to them, an unexpected insidious academic threat is on the scene: a revolution in artificial intelligence has created powerful new automatic writing tools. These are machines optimised for cheating on school and university papers, a potential siren song for students that is difficult, if not outright impossible, to catch. Of course, cheats have always existed, and there is an eternal and familiar cat-and-mouse dynamic between students and teachers. But where once the cheat had to pay someone to write an essay for them, or download an essay from the web that was easily detectable by plagiarism software, new AI language-generation technologies make it easy to produce high-quality essays.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Rob Reich wears many hats: political philosopher, director of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. In recent years, Reich has delved deeply into the ethical and political issues posed by revolutionary technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI). His work is not always easy for technologists to hear. In his book, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, Reich and his co-authors (computer scientist Mehran Sahami and social scientist Jeremy M. Weinstein) argued that tech companies and developers are so fixated on "optimization" that they often trample on human values.