Programme of Study and Year: 3rd Year MA Philosophy
Intern Position: ChatGPT and OpenAI Intern
Hobbies: Engaging in Platonic dialogues
Favourite song right now: Bar italia – Banks / Bar italia – miracle crush
Describe your role in 4 words: AI Innovation but responsible
Is AI transformative technology or is it pure hype? How can a big organisation like the University of Edinburgh use AI responsibly for digital service delivery? Is it even possible to innovate while staying faithful to ethical commitments and excellence?
Those were some of the questions we were tackling with my teammate Wietske this summer. Sounds interesting? This is the best part of the summer internships at ISG. One might expect that students would not be given complicated tasks and a lot of responsibility, and it really is rarely the case (a lot of my friends are stuck inventing excel formulas). ISG made sure our experience was really intellectually stimulating.
We got a lot of support from our manager, who made sure not to overwhelm us with tasks and was always available to help, but ultimately, I could not be happier with how much trust was put in us. It is an empowering experience to have a first internship and already feel like a member of the team doing meaningful things. We even were encouraged and successfully created an application based on generative AI.
ISG made sure we had a lot of freedom to explore the subjects of AI and Ethics. We were given complete freedom regarding what we will say or come up with, which was a great part of our job. This was the other positive aspect of our experience, there was no pressure to pretend to be positive about everything AI related, we were expected to be rational, even if we would find that it is not useful or ethical to use AI at all (Spoiler alert, this was not the case!)
Overall, it was a very positive experience in a really diverse hospitable group of people from all around the world and I would encourage every ambitious student to apply!
Bartek
