On the use of machine learning in healthcare and the United Healthcare AI scandal Some of you may know that I am a sociologist by training — to be exact, I studied medical sociology in graduate school. This means I focused on how people and groups interact with illness, medicine, healthcare institutions, and concepts and ideas around health.* I taught undergraduates going into healthcare fields about these issues while I was an adjunct professor, and I think it’s really important for people who become our healthcare providers to have insight into the ways our social, economic, and racial statuses interact with our health.

On deepfakes, authenticity, and the President’s Executive Order on AI One of the many interesting ethical issues that comes with the advances of generative AI is detection of the product of models . It’s a practical issue as well, for those of us who consume media. Is this thing I am reading or looking at the product of a person’s thoughtful work, or just words or images probabilistically generated to appeal to me?

Much of the division between technology and human activity is artificial — how do people make our work possible? We don’t talk enough about how much manual, human work we rely upon to make the exciting advances in ML possible. The truth is, the division between technology and human activity is artificial. All the inputs that make models are the result of human effort, and all the outputs in one way or another exist to have an impact on people.