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With artificial intelligence steadily working its way into our digital lives and posing the prospect of an AI-fueled future, a new class offering, Critical AI , is introducing students to its history and examining the sociocultural impacts of the transformative technology.
The Department of English and Creative Writing class is being taught this fall by James “Jed” Dobson , an associate professor of English and creative writing and director of the Writing Program who has been appointed special advisor to the provost for artificial intelligence for 2024-25.
“The class looks at artificial intelligence from a humanities perspective, applying cultural critique to assess its impact, while understanding how these technologies came to be, how they work, and how they fail,” says Dobson, the author of several books and essays on computational methods including machine learning, computer vision, and data mining.
Through the term, the class has followed the history and development of AI from the fundamentals of neural networks and how they work for different applications to the emergence of generative AI that uses computer models trained to mimic human language to create text, image, video, and other content, says Dobson.
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This course has absolutely changed my understanding of AI.
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Dagny Scannell ’25Students also consider critical questions about the data used to train models; biases that emerge from who curates and labels data; how the technologies are being used; and how they will impact society and culture. “We’re asking social questions at the same time that we’re thinking about technical questions such as what is involved in transforming an image or a section of text into data,” says Dobson.“I think what has been most interesting to me is the thought around acknowledging labor in the making of AI,” says Sarah Williams ’25, who is majoring in anthropology modified with women’s and gender studies. “When we use OpenAI or ChatGPT, it’s not necessarily the machine or program that is producing the responses we ask for. It’s the hundreds (thousands) of data analysts, computer scientists, and historians who have done the work to make a produced response possible.”Image Associate Professor of English and Creative […]
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