Large Language Models and the Returns of Critical Theory

Public lecture by Professor Wendy Chun.

When the humanities and AI are usually brought together, it is under the rubric of "ethical AI,” in which ethics is outsourced to the humanities. To move away from this increasingly bankrupt and problematic formulation and to help build a relationship based on the similarities between these two areas, this talk explores how fundamental concepts and axioms within critical theory and natural language processing intersect: from the notion that value stems from difference to the mapping of latent and manifest spaces. By moving from these similarities--not differences--we can begin to understand the limitations of existing generative AI models and why their insights seem to offer critical theorists, deja vu.

Bio

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Professor in the School of Communication, and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. At the Institute, she leads the Mellon-funded Data Fluencies Project, which combines the interpretative traditions of the arts and humanities with critical work in the data sciences to express, imagine, and create innovative engagements with (and resistances to) our data-filled world. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is author many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and is currently a Visiting Professor. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has also held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Registration

Limited seating. Please sign up via email to nannab@hum.ku.dk. 

The event is jointly organized by the ERC funded research project Data Loss: the Politics of Disappearance, Destruction and Dispossession of Digital Societies and Maria Antoniak, postdoc at the Pioneer Centre for AI and incoming Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.