In the past few months, artificial intelligence has been all over the news.

We're all trying to figure out how to live in a world where everything from college essays to wedding vows to mental health advice can be outsourced to a chatbot.

Meanwhile, the rollout of some AI systems hasn't been entirely smooth.

The National Eating Disorders Association, for example, replaced its human-staffed helpline

with an AI chatbot, but took it offline after it started giving problematic advice.

So today we're going to be talking about how artificial intelligence works, how AI connects

to and differs from human cognition, and how

studying human cognition could help researchers improve AI systems. So what's going on inside the

black box of AI? In what ways are the AI systems we're using similar to human cognition,

and in what ways are they different?

How is AI changing the way scientific research, including psychological research, is being done?

And more broadly, how will it change our lives in the future?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association

that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life.

I'm Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Tom Griffiths, a professor of psychology and computer science

and director of the computational cognitive science lab at Princeton University.

He's interested in developing mathematical models of human thinking and decision-making,

and in exploring how human cognition connects to ideas from artificial intelligence,

machine learning, and statistics.

He's the author of many scientific papers and of a book called Algorithms

to Live By, about the parallels between the everyday problems that arise in human lives

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