Logo on the glass entryway to the Humanities Institute, 2019. (Sean Flynn\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nLauren Goodlad, chair of the Critical AI Initiative at Rutgers University is the lead on this effort. Design Justice AI is supported by a $250,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The group includes international collaborators at the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, and the Australian National University.<\/p>\n
The UConn team includes Michael P. Lynch, director of the Humanities Institute and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of philosophy; and Yohei Igarashi, associate director and coordinator of digital humanities and media studies for the Humanities Institute and associate professor of English.<\/p>\n
The UConn Humanities Institute\u2019s inclusion in this work acknowledges how the Institute has established itself as a global leader in the digital humanities.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe institute has a long-standing research commitment to the ethics of AI,\u201d Lynch says. \u201cAnd that is a way of trying to grapple with the changes that algorithms are bringing to our society, in particular the changes that they\u2019re bringing to how we think, how we treat each other, and how we distribute research.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rise of \u201cgenerative AI,\u201d like ChatGPT, which can produce remarkably human-sounding text, or the image generator DALL-E, has also generated conversations about the nature of creativity, culture, knowledge, and learning.<\/p>\n
AI technologies are generally trained on data scraped indiscriminately from the internet, meaning they adopt human biases inherent in the data. This had led to, for example, Microsoft\u2019s 2016 \u201cTayTweets\u201d chatbot experiment learning to spew hate speech on Twitter.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese models are trained on the internet, which raises all sorts of problems of bias and banality,\u201d Igarashi says. \u201cSo that\u2019s one of the core issues \u2013 what do humanists have to contribute to making artificial intelligence work for us in positive ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
Design Justice AI will fund up to 20 interdisciplinary scholars to study questions that, rather than rejecting generative AI outright, explore how these technologies can be inclusive and have a positive impact on human communication and creativity.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things we need to hurry up and do is to try to figure out how we can actually use this technology in a way that reflects our better selves, rather than those parts of us that are undemocratic, non-inclusive \u2013 the worst parts of us,\u201d Lynch says.<\/p>\n
Researchers at the University of Pretoria will help advance the goal of thinking about the relationship between under-resourced languages, like those spoken on the African continent, and technologies largely developed by English-speaking engineers. The hope of this work is to uncover and think critically about the kind of assumptions developers in the Global North are making when designing AI technologies.<\/p>\n
Design Justice AI is a thoroughly interdisciplinary effort that will foster conversation between both humanities and STEM researchers in this field.<\/p>\n
Funded researchers will disseminate their findings through Critical AI\u2019s public-facing blog<\/a>, interdisciplinary peer-reviewed publications, and other channels.<\/p>\nThe effort will conclude with a meeting at the University of Pretoria next summer.<\/p>\n
Lynch says he sees this effort as the beginning of new collaborations between researchers studying questions that will only become more important as AI technology becomes more ubiquitous and complex.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not the end. It\u2019s the start of something,\u201d Lynch says. \u201cMy hope is to form a stable sustainable research network between these universities on these topics.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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