My Take on AI

I live in the spaces between languages. At home, I bridge my English slang with accented Mandarin and fragments of Hindi. At my desk, I connect Python and Java, move numbers through words, and translate ideas into code.

So, too, are the spaces between the journeys that have shaped my life, pockets of truth suspended between competing stories. On my last visit to Delhi, I asked my ninety-four-year-old grandfather about his past. Over a steaming cup of masala chai, he spoke of his time in the Indian army and the killing of thousands during the India-China war in 1962. Newspapers in India condemned the Chinese invasion. On the other side of the Himalayas, my Chinese relatives knew only of a righteous war.

Then as now, media shapes our perceptions and imagination. For as long as I can remember, reading The Washington Post at breakfast has been as normal as scrambled eggs and buttered toast. After I entered a middle school magnet program in math, science, and computer science, my interests gravitated increasingly toward stories on technology, and a stack of clippings from WIRED climbed the sides of my desk drawer.

My love of technology and media led me to MATTER Magazine, Exeter’s sole science publication. Yet, I was dismayed at the moribund state of the magazine. MATTER never focused on a single theme within an issue and it came out once a year, if at all. Few people even knew that it existed. I began lobbying for three issues a year, beginning with a special issue on Artificial Intelligence. 

Elected editor-in-chief my junior year, I led the effort to increase our budget, develop a new logo, and redesign the layout. I recruited new student writers with original voices, often waking at five AM to edit their pieces. When the AI Special Issue came out, I was thrilled to see students across campus engrossed in the magazine. Administrators and science teachers sought copies to use as course material and to mail to parents, and my inbox was inundated with emails from students asking if they could join MATTER. MATTER now comes out thrice a year, and Exeter’s campus newspaper even includes a regular “MATTER Column on Science and Technology.” MATTER finally, well …. matters at Exeter.

On campus, when I pass students on the well-worn staircases or snow-dusted paths, I wonder if they know how AI shapes the stories and messages they see on their smartphones. With the AI-fueled rise of digital disinformation, my combined passion for media and technology found another way to manifest itself. I spent this past summer researching how to distinguish truth from falsehood at UMD’s AI Lab and designed algorithms to decipher the intent behind tampered images. Intent, after all, is the crucial difference between political satire and political sabotage.

On my recent trip to China, I both marveled at the efficiency of AI-powered grocery delivery and winced at my cousin’s caution when he wrote even innocent social media posts. We both know that his words are tracked and that the information he receives is controlled.

I see media as the gatekeeper and messenger between science and society. The exponentially growing power of computer science can be harnessed to unify us by helping us understand events from multiple perspectives. Yet, it can also be unleashed to drive us apart by feeding us fake news and trapping us in our own echo chambers. I want to join the fight to keep digital media accountable and help those with benign intentions outsmart those with malicious ones.

These days, I wonder if my Indian grandfather believes everything he sees on WhatsApp and if my Chinese grandmother questions anything she reads on WeChat. I wonder if my generation – the digital generation – can be any wiser. In a world with words that divide and code that confuses, I see a bright opportunity for me to help bridge the spaces.