IA Practice ↓

Dan Heck is TUG's Chief AI Ethicist. He loves making complex problems clear so that groups can wrestle with difficult issues together. Drawing on his community organizing and church leadership background, he finds a lot of satisfaction in integrating insights from diverse stakeholders to help formulate ethical and effective strategies. His motivating conviction is that if ethical groups don't succeed in competitive environments, less ethical groups will take their place and make life worse overall.

Dan is an author with over 20 years of experience in nonprofit leadership. His experience includes managing teams of hundreds of people in high-pressure environments, the application of social and moral psychology to persuasion, social work and care provision, small and large group leadership, routine public speaking, and implementing randomized control group research.

In his free time, he enjoys playing with artificial intelligence systems in transparent and public ways to explore their limits, using them to help illuminate the social landscape that they are rapidly changing. Dan is known to invite GPT-4 into thought-provoking exchanges and likes to create AI-generated art for visual commentary on his writing. He also spends much of his time creating elaborate imaginary worlds with his daughter as part of their collaborative, imaginative storytelling games.