Citation Needed: Humility, Trust, and Human Judgment in the Age of AI
Tuesday, October 27, 2026, 3:00pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room, HBL 4th Floor
We already communicate our research with voice, judgment, and purpose. Wikipedia shows how public knowledge can be written in a register that earns trust through openness, sourcing, and revisability rather than through authority alone, a different way of writing with purpose than the one scholarship usually defaults to. Generative AI raises a sharper question, though not the one most of us expected. The systems arriving over the next two years are likely to match or exceed expert-level reasoning and knowledge in most fields, so the live question is no longer whether AI can imitate a scholarly register but what remains ours once it can produce one in full: our purpose, what we owe our audiences, and the points where our judgment still has to enter. Following a short provocation, we will use an emerging reflective tool, built with and for humanities communicators, to surface how you actually want to show up when the tools keep changing and the judgment stays human. Whether you use these tools every day or keep your distance from them on principle, this session is for you: the caution many humanists bring is part of the judgment we want to examine.
Workshop Co-Designers:
Kath Burton, Founder of Radically Hopeful and Co-Director of the CHC Scholars Program
Anke Finger, Professor of German and Media Studies, UConn, and Co-Director of the CHC Scholars Program
Tamara Poles, Founder and CEO of Universal SciCom
Arash Zhagi, Professor of Engineering, UConn
Cosponsored by the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, the Humanities Institute, Universal SciCom, and Radically Hopeful.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible
