2021: Critically reflecting on how AI is impacting society—Interview with IRIS

 

This month, we’re looking back to 2021, when the Interchange Forum of Reflecting on Intelligent Systems (IRIS) was founded at the University of Stuttgart. IRIS aims to bring researchers together to critically reflect on the foundations, mechanisms, implications, and effects of intelligent systems in research, teaching, and society.

Steffen Staab and Maria Wirzberger have led the project since its beginning. In the following interview, they reflect on key moments since the project’s founding and why IRIS’s work is critical for ensuring AI is used responsibly.

 

What was the original motivation behind starting IRIS? What problems did it seek to address?

The University of Stuttgart is a technically oriented university. Many of our colleagues, including ourselves, develop and investigate intelligent systems. By intelligent systems, we do not only refer to artificial intelligence systems, though these are included and are at the heart of what we do personally. We also refer to, for example, urban, traffic, or biological systems that exhibit beneficial or detrimental emergent properties resulting from perception, intelligent processing, and (re-)action, including system resilience or failure, among others.

Specifying the desired behavior of such intelligent systems is notoriously difficult and requires reflecting on the implications for individuals, groups, or society at large. This is a transdisciplinary challenge that must include not only technical disciplines but also the humanities and the social sciences, as well as society at large. IRIS serves as a forum for people within and beyond our university to gather and address these challenges.

Addressing the outlined challenges, we focus on three core dimensions: research, teaching, and public engagement. In research, we address timely questions at disciplinary intersections, for example, how AI is shaping political opinion and public discourse, or how it changes workplace characteristics in safety-critical domains. In teaching, we offer students and educators opportunities to foster a critical and reflective mindset towards the potential ethical and social impacts of intelligent systems. In public engagement, we foster dialog with the public through various formats that explain our research to society and provide a platform for citizens to share their thoughts and concerns about technological advances.

 

Looking back over the past five years, which activities or initiatives from IRIS were a particular highlight for you and why do they stand out?

IRIS was started in early 2021, i.e., before the ChatGPT moment in November 2022. So one of the highlights in research was the hiring of junior research groups who started in 2023. They have all contributed significantly to studying the implications of chatbots and, later on, agentic AI: how AI may violate ethical constraints, can be deceptive, or be biased.

Other highlights included our joint online summer school with NoBias in the fall of 2021, which attracted more than 100 doctoral and postdoctoral researchers. Or the ACM Web Science Conference in summer 2024, which featured prominent keynotes from the US, China, and Europe from a variety of academic disciplines.

In teaching, our highlights include the implementation of course offerings for both schools and higher education, targeting the promotion of a critical mindset towards the unintended side effects of intelligent systems in personal and professional domains. Focusing on teaching at the University of Stuttgart alone, we have reached almost 3000 students so far and, due to their positive feedback, are currently expanding our offering, encouraged by the rectorate. On a related note, we were even successful in acquiring third-party funding for developing a digital learning offer for schools, focusing, among other things, on cyberbullying and algorithmic manipulation.

Finally, a particular highlight in public engagement constitutes our proposal “Questions to Colleague AI”, representing one of 26 projects funded by the former Federal Ministry of Education and Research as part of the Year of Science 2022. This project brought to life a variety of high-profile events, and featured, among others, a special concert with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra performing a novel AI-composed music piece, a debate series with leading panelists, and a virtual citizen’s council moderated by a specifically developed AI bot.

 

Why is it important to draw on expertise from different disciplines when critically reflecting on AI’s impact on society?

Different disciplines have memories of when past situations caused problems of a similar nature. We may, for example, unfortunately observe some transhumanists raising fascist-like talking points today, and there is a broad literature about the dangers that result from such points of view. Different disciplines have developed a range of methodologies to analyze and solve new problems and cultivated diverging portfolios that can be leveraged to build and refine reflective capacities among involved stakeholders. Hence, restricting ourselves to only a few technical disciplines would severely limit our ability to comprehensively address high-impact, newly emerging societal consequences.

 

In what ways has being part of Cyber Valley supported IRIS in achieving its aims?

Cyber Valley provides an ecosystem of like-minded people across both the Universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen, the Max Planck and Fraunhofer Institutes, and various companies and foundations, sparking regular opportunities for dialog and exchange. In addition to several local colleagues at our institution as part of cross-site initiatives like the Center for Bionic Intelligence Tübingen Stuttgart (BITS), we are also connected to colleagues located in Tübingen and, until recently, have benefited from recurring inputs from Professor Bob Williamson as a wise, encouraging, and incredibly motivating member of the IRIS International Advisory Board. Also, Dr. Ksenia Keplinger from the Stuttgart site of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems is actively involved in IRIS as an associated member.

 

Has anything about how we think about “responsible AI” changed since IRIS was founded, and if so, how?

When IRIS was founded, “responsible AI” was still a niche topic. Now, its importance has been globally recognized, particularly with the European AI Act as a visible and binding legal framework, which has been defined as a mandatory standard across member states. With the rapidly increasing capabilities of current AI, its challenges have become tremendously more severe and urgent. Even more so, if we consider emerging critical dynamics such as sycophancy and the resulting emotional addiction to conversational AI. These observations demonstrate the significant influence AI has on individuals and on interpersonal relationships. Related challenges cannot be tackled from a technical perspective alone, making IRIS’s contributions even more significant.

 

The University of Stuttgart has also been in conversation with Maria Wirzberger and Steffen Staab, asking them to reflect on how IRIS is shaping an AI future that supports society. Read the full interview here.

 

To celebrate Cyber Valley's ten-year anniversary, we'll be sharing a variety of content across our website and social media channels reflecting on milestones from the last decade. Stay tuned for the next installments!