CHCI

The Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) has awarded the UConn Humanities Institute (UCHI) a grant of $25,000 for their project “Reading Between the Lines: An Interdisciplinary Glossary for Human-Centered AI.” Funded by CHCI’s Human Craft in the Age of Digital Technologies Initiative, this grant will allow UCHI along with our partners at the International University of Rabat (UIR) to create an interdisciplinary glossary that interrogates the meaning of key AI concepts.

This project brings an international cohort of humanists, engineers, and scientists into conversation through an in-person symposium and a series of podcast dialogues illuminating how the definitions of terms associated with Artificial Intelligence vary widely by discipline, location, and language. The symposium and the podcasts will be structured to address the challenges that language and translation (both conceptual and linguistic) pose to collaboration on AI research.

“We often use the same words—like ‘learning’ or ‘intelligence’—when we are talking about AI, but what those words mean depend on our own academic and cultural background and the assumptions that accompany them,” notes Anna Mae Duane, PI and Director of the UConn Humanities Institute. “The humanities bring crucial insights about language and meaning that can help us to engage these gaps in constructive ways. Working with our partners at the International University of Rabat in Morocco, we’ll bring together voices from computer science, medicine, law, and the humanities to develop better ways of understanding each other and this transformative technology.”

This project showcases UCHI’s interdisciplinarity and its growing global connections. “Reading Between the Lines” draws on the expertise of the Humanistic AI Working Group, a cross-disciplinary team of over twenty UConn researchers, who have been meeting monthly since Fall 2024, and deepens UCHI’s pre-existing partnership with AI scholars at UIR. Through CHCI’s Human Craft in the Age of Digital Technologies Initiative, the grant project will bring UCHI and affiliated faculty into conversation with additional humanities centers and institutes all over the world who are launching projects related to AI, digital technologies, and the human.

The project is being led by Anna Mae Duane, UCHI Director and Professor of English, with the support of collaborators including Clarissa J. Ceglio, UCHI Associate Director of Collaborative Research and Associate Professor of Digital Humanities; Nasya Al-Saidy, UCHI Managing Director; Dan Weiner, Vice Provost of UConn Global Affairs; Allison Cassaly, Global Initiatives Coordinator, UConn Global Affairs; and Ihsane Hmamouchi, Vice-Dean at the International Faculty of Medicine at the International University of Rabat.

The UConn Humanities Institute is excited to announce that its joint application with Rutgers University for a Global Humanities Institute on Design Justice AI has been awarded funding. The project, which is led by the Rutgers Center of Cultural Analysis, has three (co-PI) partner institutes: the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, the Center for Advancement of Scholarship at the University of Pretoria, and the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut. Supported by the Mellon Foundation via the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, the project will fund an interdisciplinary series of workshops and conferences dedicated to building sustainable global research partnerships that address the ethics of artificial intelligence, including a two-week long institute held at the University of Pretoria in 2024.

The rapid diffusion of so-called “Generative AI”—machine learning technologies that simulate human languages, communication, arts, and cultures through the statistical modeling of vast troves of “scraped” internet data, including ChatGPT and Dall-E3—signals the importance of bringing humanities scholars into conversations about “ethical AI.” The challenge of studying “generative AI” is to lay out the stakes, human as well as humanistic, of commercial technologies that aim to influence—even “revolutionize”—the practices and political economies that bear on human cultural production. The Global Humanities Institute on Design Justice AI will ask:

What would be lost from human creativity and diversity if writers or visual artists come to rely on predictive models trained on selective datasets that exclude the majority of the world’s many cultures and languages?

What frameworks or evaluation practices might help to concretize what is meant by “intelligence,” “understanding,” or “creativity”—for machines as well as humans? How might such humanistic interventions help diverse citizens to participate in the design and implementation of generative technologies and the benchmarks that evaluate them?

If evidence suggests that “generative AI” is harmful—and/or counter to the professed object of enhancing human lifeworlds—what alternatives might be forged through community participation in research that rearticulates goals, and reframes design from the bottom up? What kinds of teaching, research, community practices, and policies might sustain these humanist-inflected and justice-oriented design processes?

These research questions go to the heart of what inclusive collaborations can contribute to the study of resource-intensive technologies that aim to monetize and “disrupt” human communication and creativity.

This project is an exciting reaffirmation of UCHI’s dedication to addressing crucial issues on a global scale.