Chinese ‘behaviour’ remarks by MIT scientist Rosalind Picard rattle top AI conference

Keynote speaker apologises after using ‘irrelevant’ example of misbehaviour that specified a Chinese student’s nationality

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MIT scientist Rosalind Picard. Photo: MIT Alumni

Published: 10:00pm, 16 Dec 2024Updated: 11:29pm, 16 Dec 2024

A speech by an American scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during a top AI conference last week has sparked anger for comments that specified the Chinese nationality of a university student in an example of misbehaviour.

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

According to Picard, the student – who was from a well-known school in China – tried to justify using AI for an assignment by explaining that “I did it to make my paper results look better. Nobody at my school taught us morals or values”.

“I was shocked to hear that they thought this was justifiable behaviour there,” Picard told the conference, adding that “most Chinese who I know are extremely honest and morally upright”.

After her presentation, MIT’s Rosalind Picard was challenged by an audience member for pointing out the nationality of a student who had been expelled from a university for misbehaviour. Photo: Handout

During a Q&A session that followed, a Chinese attendee challenged Picard on her remarks, noting that it was the only time in the entire lecture where she explicitly mentioned nationality in relation to behaviour.

What Picard said “reflected a deeply troubling and racist view of Chinese scholars”, Furong Huang, an associate professor in the computer science department at the University of Maryland, remarked on social media, adding: “This was not just inappropriate but also profoundly disheartening.”