AI and the Future of the Humanities

While AI holds much promise for certain fields and certain tasks, it poses an unprecedented series of challenges for the humanities and by extension, for democratic engagement. At the core of the humanities are reading and writing, which teach some of the key abilities necessary for democratic engagement, including critical thinking, historical understanding, and empathy. Reading and writing can now be outsourced to AI, but what students may not understand is that these chatbots are trained on existing discourse, which means they reproduce existing biases, and they cannot differentiate between true and false information. And by not learning critical analytical skills, students are left to the mercy of increasingly sophisticated misinformation campaigns that now plague contemporary political discourse.

This seminar will explore both the potential and the pitfalls of AI for the humanities and for democratic engagement. How actually does AI generate text? What is “artificial” about artificial intelligence? What is new or not new about the moment we are now in? Given the ubiquity of AI at the current moment, what is the path forward for the humanities?

SPEAKERS

Dr. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Rutgers University

Dr. Wendy Chun, Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Simon Fraser University

Dr. Elizabeth Dubois, University Research Chair in Politics, Communication and Technology, University of Ottawa

Dr. Mél Hogan, Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media, Queen's University

Robyn Moody, independent artist

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Host or Publisher The Calgary Institute for the Humanities