The AI and the Humanities Collaboratory will consider one of the most pressing questions for higher education: what is the future of humanities in the context of AI? While much of the campus has been focused on AI integration and instruction using new technology, this group will focus on the implications of such technology for humanities in higher education. Our goal is to approach this not from an educational technology or informational technology standpoint, but rather from a critical and ethical one. In other words, we seek to marshal the fundamental shared elements of the humanities and social sciences – critical thinking, ethics, language, and context – to bring a deeper and more reasoned consideration to this moment of upheaval in both higher education and culture writ large.
Members
- Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, PhD (Film Studies and English)
- Ann Hanlon (UWM Libraries, Digital Collections and Initiatives)
- Stuart Moulthrop, PhD (English)
- Marc Tasman (Journalism, Advertising, & Media Studies)
- Anne Pycha, PhD (Linguistics)
Upcoming Events
Attentive or Absentminded: Habits of Mind in the Age of AI with Meghan O’Gieblyn
April 10, 2025 @ 4:00-5:00 PM | Golda Meir Library, 4th Floor Conference Center
Join the Center for 21st Century Studies and the AI and the Humanities Collaboratory for lecture by Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God Human Animal Machine and the essay collection Interior States, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award.
At a moment when we are outsourcing many intellectual and creative tasks to machines, it’s worth thinking about the point of thinking itself. Is it a means to an end, or an end in itself? Are humans just “stochastic parrots,” mindlessly producing language in a way that is not so different from AI, as some tech luminaries contend, or is there something more going on in our minds?
While these questions may seem new, they harken back to older debates about the relationship between thought and language, freedom and necessity, and the fine line that exists between attention and automaticity. Long before the advent of digital technologies, two twentieth century philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, wrote about some of these questions through the lens of the technologies of their times. Their writing anticipates many of the challenges of the age of AI and calls attention to the more ordinary and insidious ways that consciousness becomes ossified by social convention, as well as the moral and political risks that arise when we fail to “think what we are doing.”
Refreshments will be served at 3:30 PM. Lecture begins at 4 PM. This event is free and open to the public.