Democracy and public discourse are mutually dependent. Their quality is determined by the basis of information. The flood of misinformation in the social media has already caused great damage here. Now, however, a real paradigm shift is emerging with the meteoric rise of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. AI-driven “next word prediction” will increasingly replace encyclopedic knowledge and redacted information. Probability models are the information sources of the future. Those who sit at the levers of these models will decide the content of the information in the future. This will change democracy. Tendencies toward a technocracy are casting their shadows ahead. The call for an AI moratorium by Elon Musk and Co. is a foretaste.
Meinhard Lukas (AT)
Meinhard Lukas has held the office of Rector at the JKU since October 2015. He is a Professor of Civil Law and has held numerous academic positions, including Dean of the Faculty of Law (2011 to 2015). Furthermore, Meinhard Lukas is an expert at the Ministry of Justice for legislative procedures, an Austrian representative in the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), an Advisory Board member of “Linz Cultural Development Plan New” and a corresponding member of the Medical Society for Upper Austria. During his term as Rector at the JKU, Meinhard Lukas has advocated pursuing stronger dialogue between art and technology by partnering with Ars Electronica to support the Ars Electronica Festival and to initiate the Festival University, as well as by promoting the development of the Art x Science School for Transformation, an interuniversity program offered jointly by the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the JKU.