Chinese “behavioral” remarks from MIT scientist Rosalind Picard rock top AI conference

Rosalind Picard, a professor of health sciences and technology at the MIT Media Lab, gave a speech Friday during a keynote address in Vancouver, Canada, at NeurIPS 2024 – the 38th annual conference on neural information processing systems – where she highlighted an incident in which A Chinese student who had been expelled was involved.

According to Picard, the student, who came from a well-known school in China, tried to justify using AI for a task by explaining, “I did it to make the results of my work look better.” My school has Nobody taught us morals or values.”

“I was shocked to hear that they thought that was justified behavior there,” Picard said at the conference, adding that “most Chinese people I know are extremely honest and morally upright.”

During a subsequent question-and-answer session, a Chinese participant questioned Picard’s comments, noting that this was the only time in the entire lecture that she specifically mentioned nationality in relation to her behavior.