"The word AI is sprinkled over everything," says Ben Shneiderman in the below interview from 2018. This line, perhaps not intentionally, serves as a prognostication - or foretelling - of artificial intelligence's presence that has never held more true. I hardly remember its inclusion in syllabi during high school, from which I graduated just three years back. Now, it's almost guaranteed you'll find some policy surrounding AI usage under any course website here at Harvard. Not only that, but it has completely reshaped the materials taught in these classes. Multiple lectures in my democratic theory class have almost exclusively analyzed its modern-day implications because of the simple fact: the tool has never been more pervasive in human society - be its vocal impersonations of well-known politicians or spread of other political jargon, the recently-added AI Overview found atop most Safari browser searches, or its creation of dancing cat videos that your grandmother tags you in on Facebook. AI is here, and it's there. The tool is, to Shneiderman's on-point forecast, everywhere.
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