"When Does AI Deliver Meaningful Benefit With Alex John London, PhD and Ida Mattsson"

In this episode of PRIM&R's podcast, "Research Ethics Reimagined," we explore the ethics of artificial intelligence systems that emulate real people with Alex John London, PhD, the K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies and co-lead of the K&L Gates Initiative in Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University, and Ida Mattsson, a PhD student at CMU. London and Mattsson discuss their co-authored paper on "systems that emulate identifiable individuals," drawing on a case study of voice-based AI designed to assist older adults experiencing cognitive decline. They examine when assistance becomes unjustified paternalism or deception, how responsibility is shared among developers, deployers, and the people being emulated, and why institutional review boards (IRBs) are a limited tool for overseeing technologies of this kind.