Event

The Wolf Humanities Center presents the Forum on Keywords Series featuring Ted Underwood, Associate Professor and LAS Centennial Scholar of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

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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—I'll explore the institutional conditions we would need for humanists and computer scientists to work together on them as partners.

Featured Speaker

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.

This event is co-sponsored by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities. 

The Wolf Humanities Center is Penn’s main hub for interdisciplinary humanities research and public programming. Established in 2017 by a gift from Noelle and Dick Wolf, the center grew out of the Penn Humanities Forum, founded by Wendy Steiner in 1999. Our goals are to demonstrate how vital the humanities are to the life of the mind and the health of society, and how fundamentally connected they are with many areas of urgent inquiry in medicine, law, business, and the sciences.