Dept of Computer Science & Human-Computer Interaction Lab
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
ben@cs.umd.edu @benbendc
Generative AI Tools, like ChatGPT, Bard, and Midjourney, provide powerful features for users, but also bring substantial dangers. Generating text, answering questions, summarizing documents, and writing code are common text-based applications, complemented by multimedia images, videos, songs, and speech.
Generative AI products are often impressive, but sometimes troubling. Potential dangers include errors from “hallucinations”, biased statements, violations of privacy, and copyright infringement. Can these dangers be prevented or mitigated sufficiently to bring commercial success beyond the initial bubble of excitement?
This tutorial will address these opportunities and dangers, focusing on applications in education, medicine, and creative industries. We will focus on how HCI researchers and user experience designers can develop control panels that enable users to get what they want more easily and more often. The guiding principles stem from human moral and legal responsibility for the uses of technology. For users, the message is: Generative AI is powerful so learn to use it; Generative AI is flawed, so be careful.
BEN SHNEIDERMAN is an Emeritus Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, IEEE, NAI, and the Visualization Academy and a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He has received six honorary doctorates in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization. His widely-used contributions include the clickable highlighted web-links, high-precision touchscreen keyboards for mobile devices, and tagging for photos. Shneiderman’s information visualization innovations include dynamic query sliders for Spotfire, development of treemaps for viewing hierarchical data, novel network visualizations for NodeXL, and event sequence analysis for electronic health records.
Ben is the lead author of Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (6th ed., 2016). He co-authored Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think (1999) and Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (2nd edition, 2019). His book Leonardo’s Laptop (MIT Press) won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution. The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations (Oxford, 2016) describes how research can produce higher impacts. His book, Human-Centered AI, published by Oxford University Press in 2022, was the winner of the Association of American Publishers award for Computer and Information Systems.