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.