Artificial Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Research Framework for AI

Nina Beguš will present artificial humanities, a 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 fictional narratives play in technology. We will draw parallels between fictional and historical representations of AI, starting with Pygmalion’s Eliza Doolittle and Weisenbaum’s Eliza the chatbot and leading to Powers’s Galatea 2.2, films Her and Ex Machina, and today’s large language models.

We will conclude with an overview of humanistic approaches that address the critical questions raised by science and technology, paying particular attention to the philosophical and cultural implications of machines using human languages.

Speaker: Nina Begus, UC Berkeley