New course takes a critical look at AI technologies

As artificial intelligence gradually makes its way into our digital lives and opens the prospect of an AI-powered future, a classy new offering, Critical AIintroduces students to its history and examines the sociocultural impacts of transformative technology.

The Department of English and Creative Writing course will be taught this fall by James “Jed” DobsonAssociate Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Appointed Writing Program special advisor to the provost for artificial intelligence for 2024-25.

“The course examines artificial intelligence from a humanitarian perspective, applying cultural critique to assess its impact, while understanding how these technologies are born, how they work, and how they fail,” says Dobson, author of several books and essays on computing methods, including machine learning, computer vision, and data mining.

Throughout this course, the course 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 which uses computational models trained to imitate human language to create text, images, videos, and other content, Dobson says.

Students also consider critical questions about the data used to train the models; biases that emerge from the way data is stored and labeled; how technologies are used; and how they will impact society and culture. “We’re asking social questions at the same time as we’re thinking about technical questions like what’s involved in turning an image or section of text into data,” says Dobson.

“I think what interested me the most was the idea of ​​recognizing the work that went into creating AI,” says Sarah Williams, 25, who majors in modified anthropology with women’s studies and the kind. “When we use OpenAI or ChatGPT, it’s not necessarily the machine or the program that produces the answers we request. Hundreds (thousands) of data analysts, computer scientists and historians did the work necessary to make an answer possible.

The courses are a mix of lectures, hands-on lab sessions where students play with pre-trained networks and analyze their performance, and guest lectures by digital humanities experts from other universities.

Leif Weatherby, associate professor of German, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab, and director of digital humanities at New York University, addressed the class on October 31 and invited students to weigh in on a series of questions, including what areas of their life they think AI would affect future life, whether AI is intelligent, why they use generative AI, and how we can improve our systems. The emerging field of critical AI revolves around the question: “What is really happening?” » he said.

“This course completely changed my understanding of AI,” says Dagny Scannell ’25, a biology major with a minor in theater. “I didn’t previously know how AI models came to be, and I’m now starting to see the importance of understanding the history and constraints of AI and machine learning,” says Scannell, who hopes to become doctor and is now excited to do so. track emerging AI technologies in healthcare and medicine in a more informed way.

There aren’t many courses that explore the intersection of English and computer science, says Nicholas Nikcevic (27), who specializes in both fields. He’s amazed at how far the seemingly simple idea of ​​training large language models like ChatGPT to predict the next most likely word in a sequence has driven AI development so far.

“The course excited me about the potential of studying critical AI theory and thinking deeply about the impact of AI on various industries such as software engineering and comedy writing” , he said.

Students are very interested in policy and law issues related to AI, Dobson says. He was surprised by the general interest in this class. “I have the greatest diversity of majors than most courses I’ve taught, which is great and exciting,” he says.