CIPIL Evening Seminar: 'Faithful or Traitor? The Right of Explanation in a Generative AI World'
by Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL)
The Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) at the University of Cambridge is hosting an evening seminar titled "Faithful or Traitor? The Right of Explanation in a Generative AI World." This event will take place on Thursday, 20 November 2025, at 5:30 pm in Room G24 of the Faculty of Law. The seminar will feature Professor Lilian Edwards, Emeritus Professor of Law, Innovation & Society at Newcastle Law School, as the keynote speaker.
The seminar will delve into the evolving concept of the "right to an explanation" within the context of generative AI technologies. Professor Edwards will examine recent legal developments, including the Court of Justice of the European Union's decision in the Dun and Bradstreet case and the EU AI Act's Article 86, which introduces a right to an explanation of AI systems. The discussion will focus on the challenges of defining what constitutes an adequate explanation, considering factors such as the transparency of source code, the ability to contest AI decisions, and the potential for misleading yet plausible descriptions generated by large language models.
This hybrid event offers attendees the option to participate in person at the Cambridge Law Faculty or virtually via Zoom. Registration is required for online attendance. The seminar is particularly relevant for legal professionals, academics, policymakers, and technologists interested in the intersection of law and artificial intelligence, providing valuable insights into the legal implications of AI decision-making processes.
The Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) is renowned for its interdisciplinary research in intellectual property and information law. Drawing on the resources of the University of Cambridge, CIPIL brings together legal academics recognized for their historical and doctrinal research, promoting well-informed interdisciplinary work in these fields.
Speakers(1)
Professor Lilian Edwards
Emeritus Professor of Law, Innovation & Society at Newcastle Law School
Lilian Edwards is a leading academic in the field of Internet law. She has taught information technology law, e-commerce law, privacy law, and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate levels since 1996 and has been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985. She is now Emerita Professor at Newcastle and Honorary Professor at CREATe, University of Glasgow, which she helped co-found. She is the editor and major author of 'Law, Policy and the Internet,' one of the leading textbooks in the field of Internet law. She won the Future of Privacy Forum award in 2019 for best paper ('Slave to the Algorithm' with Michael Veale) and the award for best non-technical paper at FAccT in 2020, on automated hiring. In 2004, she won the Barbara Wellberry Memorial Prize for work on online privacy, where she invented the notion of data trusts, a concept which ten years later has been proposed in EU legislation. She is a former fellow of the Alan Turing Institute on Law and AI, and the Institute for the Future of Work. Edwards has consulted for inter alia the EU Commission, the OECD, and WIPO.
Event Details
- Date
- November 20, 2025
- Location
- 🇬🇧 Cambridge, United Kingdom
- Faculty of Law, Room G24
- Pricing
- Free
- Audience
- Legal professionals, academics, policymakers, technologists