As artificial intelligence steadily permeates our digital lives and offers a vision of what the AI-powered future holds, our new class, Critical AI, introduces students to the history of artificial intelligence and introduces them to a society of innovative technologies. Examining cultural influences.
This fall, classes in the Department of English and Creative Writing will be joined by James James, associate professor of English and creative writing, director of the writing program, and appointed special advisor to the Department of Artificial Intelligence for 2024-2025. Taught by “Jed” Dobson. .
“This class examines artificial intelligence from a humanities perspective and examines how these technologies came about, how they work, and how they fail, applying cultural critique to assess their impact.” ”says Dobson, author of several books and essays. Computational techniques such as machine learning, computer vision, and data mining.
Throughout this semester, Dobson said the class will cover everything from the basics of neural networks to how neural networks work in various applications, mimicking human language, text, images, videos, and more. .
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This course completely changed my understanding of AI.
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Dagny Scannell ’25
Students will also consider important questions about the data used to train models. Bias caused by who curates and labels the data. How technology is being used. And what impact does it have on society and culture? “While we’re thinking technical questions, like what’s involved in converting an image or a piece of text into data, we’re also asking social questions,” Dobson says.
“I think the most interesting thing for me was the idea around recognizing the labor in creating AI,” says Sarah Williams, 25, an anthropology major with a focus on women’s and gender studies. Masu. “When we use OpenAI and ChatGPT, it’s not necessarily a machine or a program that’s generating the response we want; it’s hundreds (thousands) of data analysts, computer scientists, and historians. , we have done the work to enable the generated responses.”
Jed Dobson (right), associate professor of English and creative writing, and Leif Weatherby, director of New York University’s School of Digital Humanities, speak in Dobson’s Critical AI class. (Photo provided by Katie Lenhart)
Classes are a combination of lectures, hands-on lab sessions where students try out pre-trained networks and analyze their performance, and guest lectures by digital humanities experts from other universities.
Leif Weatherby, associate professor of German, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab, and director of digital humanities at New York University, spoke to the class on Oct. 31 and asked students to explore their research areas. He encouraged them to consider a variety of questions, including: The future of life they think AI will impact, whether AI is intelligent, what they will use generative AI for, and how it can improve our systems. The emerging field of critical AI is centered around the question, “What’s really going on?” he said.
“This course completely changed my understanding of AI,” says Dagny Scannell ’25, a fourth-year biology major and theater minor. “Before, I didn’t know how AI models were created, but now I’m starting to understand the importance of understanding the history and limitations of AI and machine learning,” says the doctor who hopes to become a doctor. Scannell says he is excited about the job. Track emerging AI technologies in healthcare and medicine in a more informed way.
There aren’t many courses that explore the intersection of English and computer science, says Nikolas Nikucevic ’27, who is majoring in both fields. He was surprised that the seemingly simple idea of training a large language model like ChatGPT to predict the next most likely word in a sequence took so long in AI development. I am.
“I was excited about the possibility of taking this course to learn important AI theory and think deeply about the impact of AI on different industries such as software engineering and comedy writing,” he says.
Dobson said students are very interested in questions about policy and law related to AI. He was surprised by the wide interest in the class. “I have the most diversity of majors than most classes I have ever taught, which is wonderful and exciting,” he says.
