Stanford in New York Events

The Dawn of AI Communication: Implications for Jobs, Trust and Humanity

Past Event: February 13, 2023, 6:00 pm EDT

This talk explores the potential of AI, like chatGPT, to transform the way people communicate. Focusing on the social, economic and psychological aspects of generative AI, this talk will explore the implications for job opportunities, trust, and our understanding of what it means to be human. We will examine how AI can quickly provide novel communication, with incredible potential to change how we converse, market, lawyer, teach and much more. But it can also hallucinate and produce misinformation, which could undermine trust and even democracy. Finally, we will look at the implications of AI for our understanding of what it means to be human, and how it will influence our relationships and the way we interact.

Jeff Hancock is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, Founding Director of the Social Media Lab and Director of the Stanford Center for Computational Social Science. A leading expert in social media behavior and the psychology of online interaction, Professor Hancock studies the impact of social media and technology on well-being, relationships, deception and trust, how we form impressions of others and how we manage others’ impressions of ourselves, and more.

His award-winning research has been published in over 100 journal articles and conference proceedings and has been supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Defense. Professor Hancock’s TED Talk on deception has been seen over 1 million times and his research has been frequently featured in the popular press, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS and the BBC.

Professor Hancock worked for Canada Customs before earning his PhD in Psychology at Dalhousie University, Canada. He was a Professor of Information Science (and co-Chair) and Communication at Cornell University prior to joining Stanford in 2015. He currently lives in Palo Alto with his wife and daughter, and he regularly gets shot at on the ice as a hockey goalie.