It is not hard to convince humanists that the field of artificial intelligence ought to be listening to us. What is not as widely recognized is that AI researchers know this and are seeking guidance. The tools produced by generative AI are effectively models of culture, and they fail to solve important problems without a model of cultural pluralism. After explaining why these problems matter—even to tech companies—Professor Underwood will explore the institutional conditions we would need for humanists and computer scientists to work together on them as partners.

Cosponsored by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Ted Underwood is Professor of Information Sciences and English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of three books on literary history, most recently Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (Chicago, 2019), but also publishes papers in venues like Sociological Science and the Association for Computational Linguistics. His current project involves building language models that incorporate viewpoint diversity and cultural change as central principles.