Humanities Center Public Lecture Series

AI, Artifice, and the Humanities

AI, Artifice, and the Humanities

What would Shakespeare and generative AI have to say to each other? Shakespeare has routinely been used to launch new technologies from telephone and celluloid film to AI. Missing in current debates about AI are humanistic insights. AI is interoperable with artifice, and artifice give meanings to technologies. From the perspective of performance studies and neurodiversity, this presentation theorizes fabricated info in AI’s output not as deviance from able-bodied norms but as a point of contact between different cognitive modes. AI’s serendipitous connections between unlikely datapoints parallel literary depictions of dreams as virtual training environments. It is crucial to re-center the arts and humanities to foster innovation and to counteract deployment of AI as an expedient mechanism.

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About the speaker:

Alexa Alice Joubin is a leading voice on AI, social justice, and higher education. She is Professor of English, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Theatre, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she directs the Digital Humanities Institute. She is a faculty of the Trustworthy AI Initiative and an affiliate at the NSF's Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society. In 2024, she was named the inaugural Public Interest Technology Scholar. She held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair at Queen Mary University of London and the University of Warwick in the UK. The inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award, she has received the Modern Language Association's Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies.

The Public Lecture Series is presented by the University of Rochester Humanities Center.