Underwood to give invited talk on AI and the humanities

Ted Underwood
Ted Underwood, Professor

Professor Ted Underwood will give an invited lecture on artificial intelligence (AI) and the humanities on October 23 at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The lecture is part of the center's "Forum on Keywords" programming for 2024-2025. 

In his talk, "Why AI Needs the Humanities as a Partner," Underwood will discuss how the tools produced by generative AI are "effectively models of culture" and do not account for cultural diversity. Generative AI learns how to express itself by observing large collections of human writing—mostly from nations such as the United States. As such, it absorbs a particular set of cultural norms, Underwood said. 

"Human users come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and a generic one-size-fits-all solution may not work for users whose beliefs or customs diverge significantly from a prevailing U.S. center of gravity. Any organization that produces a language model—whether a corporation or a university—will need to think about the model's response to the real diversity of its customers or students," he said. "What I want humanists to understand is that computer scientists are aware of this problem, and some of them are actively seeking help. And I think this is the kind of problem where we could potentially lend help."

Underwood is a professor in the iSchool and also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has authored three books about literary history, most recently Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Library Change (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019). His current research project involves building language models that incorporate viewpoint diversity and cultural change as central principles. Underwood earned his PhD in English from Cornell University.

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