Critical AI and Large Language Models for Humanists
Instructors:
Anouk Lang
Duration: 2nd week
This course is based on the premise that scholarly expertise from the humanities can, and should, be brought to bear on understanding how generative AI and related algorithmic technologies work, their broader effects on the world, and how we might more thoughtfully and responsibly engage with them. The course seeks to give enough technical background—from the probabilistic underpinnings of large language models to considerations of training corpora and interface design—for participants to be able to take an informed stance on the pressing social, ethical and environmental concerns emerging around generative AI, and to better understand the potential impact of these technologies on institutions important to the continued functioning of democracy such as the media and education. It incorporates hands-on activities which offer participants the chance to explore features of the technologies for themselves and follow their own interests. In bringing together developments from one set of disciplinary orientations—the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical AI—together with theoretical and methodological approaches from humanities subjects—such as historical perspectives on text generation technologies and insights from literary theory with established explanatory power for grasping the workings of narrative, genre and style—it seeks to model for participants a reflexively critical orientation to ‘AI’ not as the singular, stable entity which is so often the referent of technocapitalist hype, but as a collection of imbricating technologies emerging from specific historical and cultural contexts whose putative dominance we have the ability to critique and to contest.