Stoyanovich details documented AI harms to New Yorkers

Thank you for that.

I do have a direct question for Dr.

Stajanovic.

I hope I didn't mess that up too bad.

I know you said you seem skeptical of the catastrophic narrative around what's occurring, but you still have concerns about possible harms.

Can you describe to us

based on your expertise, what are the harms that are most relevant to New Yorkers?

Thank you for this question.

So we are running these systems in the city, in the public sector, in the private sector, and we have seen in New York very specific harms that come from deployed systems and with very consequential decisions.

So in my own work, I did an audit of a hiring system that claims to construct a job seeker's personality profile, a bunch of numbers from their resume or social media feed, like

a Twitter feed at the time or a LinkedIn profile.

And these systems are complete nonsense, right?

For the same job seeker, if you change something, like the file format of their resume, it's going to give you a completely different personality.

So we need to actually be looking at whether these systems even work.

I think that that should be just stop one of anything before we worry about existential risk.

We had a similar scenario with the MyCity chatbot.

I mean, we all have heard about that fiasco where the city spent half a million dollars, conservatively speaking, on a bot that advised small and medium-sized business owners to break the law, which was quite problematic, speaking with the city's authority.

So I really think that we need to be looking at cases such as these ones.

Where there are very

known risks and start there and clean up our own house.

Thank you for that and I want to thank you all for your answers and insights.

We have three members on stack, Councilmember Osei, Councilmember Hanif, and then Councilmember Maloney to close this panel.