When the humanities and artificial intelligence combine, it is typically under the label of "ethical AI."  This assumes that the humanities are inherently ethical, reducing the humanities to Mill, Kant, Bentham and Aristotle, while ignoring recent work that challenges the humanities to be more ethical, and reflect on the potential ethical shortfalls of tech companies outsourcing this aspect of their work. This talk will explore how critical theory and natural language processing intersect, seeking a deeper understanding of the limitations of existing generative AI models, and showing why their insights seem all too familiar to many critical theorists.

Speaker Bio

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Professor in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University*. At the Institute, she leads the Mellon-funded Data Fluencies Project, which combines the interpretative traditions of the arts and humanities with critical work in the data sciences to express, imagine and create innovative engagements with (and resistances to) our data-filled world.

Chun has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is author many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and is currently a Visiting Professor. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has also held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

The Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University is a group of diverse scholars and stakeholders from around the world who collaborate across disciplines, schools, industry, and public sectors to research and create vibrant democratic technologies and cultures. Institute researchers come from the humanities, social sciences, computer and data sciences to address questions of equality and social justice.  Their work aims to combat issues such as online “echo chambers,” abusive language, discriminatory algorithms and mis/disinformation.