AI | Humanities Institute

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has awarded a two-year grant of $94,000 for a multidisciplinary team of researchers, led by the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI), to advance AI research that integrates critical humanistic and social scientific perspectives. Funded by the Strategic Initiative for Multidisciplinary Research program, this grant will build capacity for successfully competing for significant external awards that require or are enhanced by a multidisciplinary approach.

Research stipends, funding for collaborative projects, and structured grant proposal development support will enable members of UCHI’s Human Centered AI team to pursue diverse funding opportunities, while monthly flash talks, human-centered design grant incubators, and targeted feedback will maintain the group’s commitment to deep interdisciplinary collaboration.

“We believe that human-centered AI will only be possible when humans from a truly diverse array of perspectives, backgrounds, and disciplinary training are involved in designing and deploying these powerful tools,” notes Anna Mae Duane, PI and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute.

UCHI’s Human-Centered AI team builds on the Humanistic AI Working Group, a cross-disciplinary team of over twenty UConn researchers, who have been meeting monthly since Fall 2024. The Humanistic AI Working Group brings together faculty from across campus, and across disciplines, to share research, resources, and funding opportunities, and to collaborate on this vital area of research.

The Human-Centered AI team is made up of academics from Statistics, Philosophy, Communications, Geography, Earth Science, Engineering, Computer Science, Journalism, LCL, and English. It ecompasses faculty from junior scholars to senior researchers. Together, this multidisciplinary group has complementary strengths that include AI’s role in human rights, educational accessibility, medical parity, and climate change. The group held its first public-facing event on January 13th, as UConn hosted an international virtual workshop with AI researchers from the International University of Rabat, Morocco.

Key faculty for the Human-Centered AI team include Anna Mae Duane (PI), Professor, English, Director, UCHI; Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering; Anke Finger, Professor of German, LCL; Trevor Harris, Assistant Professor, Statistics; Ting-an Lin, Assistant Professor, Philosophy; Jiyoun Suk, Assistant Professor, Communications; Brad Tuttle, Assistant Professor, Journalism; Lijing Wang, Assistant Professor, Earth Science; Arash Zaghi, Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) Director of Academic Affairs, Alexis Boylan, is the author of a recent article in the Boston Review that examines two new books on creativity, innovation, and artificial intelligence: The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI (Belknap Press) by Marcus du Sautoy and The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI_Powered Creativity (MIT Press) by Arthur I. Miller. These books “contend that AI is nothing to fear because humans are so much better at being creative than are machines.” Boylan, also an associate professor of art and art history at UConn, emphasizes both books’ failure to transcend hegemonic ideas of human artistic expression. Both books center their argument on a largely white and male definition of creativity and genius, dismissing altogether the contribution of feminist and black aesthetics, for example, to the totality of the human artistic potential and output:

“Both books share a kind of a priori acceptance…, that computers and machines have already displaced a certain kind of person from labor, society, and community. That’s not a question, it is the reality that these books start from. It’s also not what they see to be the problem: the problem for the authors only arises when AI threatens those who have historically controlled capital and historical narratives, and whose ideas of creativity, genius, innovation, and evolution have reigned supreme. These fears about AI, therefore, stand in for the dread of a certain cultural elite, who have weaponized creativity in a broader neoliberal narrative about human worth—and who now fear the same will be done to them. Perhaps then we should be forced to watch AI blossom and shine; maybe we deserve to be taken over with another kind of creativity.”