Comment in 2024

Sharp distinctions often drawn between machine and biological intelligences have not tracked advances in the fields of developmental biology and hybrid robotics. We call for conceptual clarity driven by the science of diverse intelligences in unconventional spaces and at unfamiliar scales and embodiments that blur conventional categories.

The EU Artificial Intelligence Act bans certain “subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness”, but uses undefined legal terms. Interdisciplinary efforts are needed to ensure effective implementation of the legal text.

Large language model-based agentic systems can process input information, plan and decide, recall and reflect, interact and collaborate, leverage various tools and act. This opens up a wealth of opportunities within medicine and healthcare, ranging from clinical workflow automation to multi-agent-aided diagnosis.

In this Comment, we propose a cumulative set of three essential criteria for the ethical use of LLMs in academic writing, and present a statement that researchers can quote when submitting LLM-assisted manuscripts in order to testify to their adherence to them.

A new class of AI models, called foundation models, has entered healthcare. Foundation models violate several basic principles of the standard machine learning paradigm for assessing reliability, making it necessary to rethink what guarantees are required to establish warranted trust in them.

Most research efforts in machine learning focus on performance and are detached from an explanation of the behaviour of the model. We call for going back to basics of machine learning methods, with more focus on the development of a basic understanding grounded in statistical theory.

Speech technology offers many applications to enhance employee productivity and efficiency. Yet new dangers arise for marginalized groups, potentially jeopardizing organizational efforts to promote workplace diversity. Our analysis delves into three critical risks of speech technology and offers guidance for mitigating these risks responsibly.

The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of the test set is used throughout machine learning (ML) for assessing a model’s performance. However, when concordance is not the only ambition, this gives only a partial insight into performance, masking distribution shifts of model outputs and model instability.

Although federated learning is often seen as a promising solution to allow AI innovation while addressing privacy concerns, we argue that this technology does not fix all underlying data ethics concerns. Benefiting from federated learning in digital health requires acknowledgement of its limitations.

Can non-state multinational tech companies counteract the potential democratic deficit in the emerging global governance of AI? We argue that although they may strengthen core values of democracy such as accountability and transparency, they currently lack the right kind of authority to democratize global AI governance.