Artificial Humanities: Centering Fiction

Artificial humanities is an interdisciplinary research framework for understanding the cultural, philosophical, and ethical dimensions of AI. This approach explores how the humanities - literature, history, and art - can deepen our understanding of artificial intelligence and its development. The talk will consider the role of fictional narratives in technology. It will draw parallels between fictional and historical representations of AI, from Shaw’s Eliza Doolittle and Weizenbaum’s ELIZA the chatbot to Powers’s Galatea 2.2 and today’s large language models. It will conclude with an overview of humanistic approaches that address critical questions raised by science and technology, paying particular attention to the philosophical and cultural implications of machines using human languages.

Speaker: Nina Beguš, UC Berkeley

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