Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities

Undergraduate / Graduate

In this course we will look at forms of artificial intelligence (AI) from the perspective of the humanities. We aim to assess the impact of AI on the creation and study of cultural materials, to question its presuppositions, and to explore how these new paradigms can be best used for the benefit of humanity. The first portion of the course will survey the history of the attempts made over the years to create AI using computational methods and the philosophical critiques of those attempts. We will then turn to how modern connectionist AI systems function, including neural networks, transformers and predictive models, and how they generate their output. In the second half of the course we will review the wide variety of recent developments in Generative AI systems that use large foundation models to generate remarkably human-like output, and we will experiment with and critically evaluate these systems via a series of hands-on exercises. We will consider the benefits and drawbacks of such tools for research in the humanities and discuss their social and cultural impact more generally.