NEW YORK—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University announced today that Seth Lazar, professor of philosophy and head of the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory lab at the Australian National University, will join the Institute as Senior AI Advisor for the 2024-2025 academic year. Lazar’s work with the Institute will focus on bringing AI researchers, industry representatives, civil society advocates, and policymakers together to focus on the risks advanced AI systems pose to democracy.

“We’re incredibly excited to bring Seth Lazar to the Institute to work on a project of critical importance: Ensuring that emerging AI tools are built and governed in ways that support, rather than undermine, democracy,” said Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director. “We look forward to involving Professor Lazar in all of the Institute’s work, including our litigation, research, policy, and public education programs.” 

Lazar will begin his term as Senior AI Advisor immediately. His project seeks to coalesce and support the emerging field of sociotechnical AI safety, which applies a sociotechnical lens to the emerging risks posed by the most advanced AI systems. As part of this project, Lazar and the Institute will host a private workshop in late fall 2024 for participating authors to meet and critique one another’s draft papers. Those participating are likely to span a number of academic fields including computer science, philosophy, law, social science, and sociology, as well as representatives from the tech industry and the national AI safety institutes. Authors will present their final papers at a major public symposium on AI and democracy to be held at Columbia University in spring 2025.

“AI’s potential impacts on democracy may far outstrip its current contribution to misinformation and polarization, as significant recent advances enable more effective and functionally autonomous systems to pervade economic and political life,” Seth Lazar said. “Anticipating, understanding, addressing and directing these impacts demands a sociotechnical approach. It also requires a willingness to look somewhat over the horizon, without becoming wholly absorbed in more distant risks. Sociotechnical AI safety is ideally-placed to answer this need. In my collaboration with the Knight Institute, I’m looking forward both to exploring how advanced AI interacts with democratic values, and to helping foster this growing field.”

Current and previous visitors at the Knight Institute include Olivier Sylvain, a professor at Fordham Law School, RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, Sonja R. West, a law professor at the University of Georgia, Arvind Narayanan, a professor of computer science at Princeton University, J. Nathan Matias, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago, and Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, information, and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. More information about their projects as well as other past visitors is available here.