Missy Cummings made her name as one of the United States’ first female fighter pilots. But it is also in her current career researching artificial intelligence, human-autonomous system collaboration, and the socio-ethical impact of technology, that she has made headlines.

Cummings, a George Mason University professor in the computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering departments of the College of Engineering and Computing, calls herself a “tech futurist,” whose job is to “make tech work. It’s not to stop tech, it’s to help it get better.”

One of the ways she does that is to call it as she sees it, such as her take on ChatGPT.