Inside the Mind of an AI:  Materiality and the Crisis of Representation

Trinity College Dublin ISSF Programme

Professor N. Katherine Hayles (UCLA) discusses strategies for how literary criticism can respond to Open AI's new GPT-3 software.

Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub

<p>OpenAI has developed a state-of-the art AI, GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer-3) that is the first AI to be able to produce human-competitive texts.  Already essays, poems, and even books generated by GPT-3 have appeared, raising deep questions about how literary criticism should respond to these texts.  This talk by Professor N. Katherine Hayles (Distinguished Research Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles) will discuss various options, arguing that literary criticism cannot afford to ignore the vast differences in materiality between humans and an AI.  The first strategy, which I call the null strategy, considers human and AI texts as being on an equal footing.  This is a mistake, Hayles will argue, for it ignores the fact that GPT-3 does not have a model of the world, which all humans effortlessly construct from birth onward.  All it has is a model of language, which opens its productions to a systemic fragility of reference. Nevertheless, from the billions of inference it makes and, even more consequentially, networks of inferences, it learns not only human language but also human social practices and even human thinking.  Thus, in addition to the null strategies, four other strategies are discussed that take into account the material basis for language generation, acknowledging that humans and AIs operate from very different epistemologies.   </p><p>Supported by a Wellcome Trust ISSF Award for Neurohumanities at Trinity College Dublin (https://www.tcd.ie/Neuroscience/ISSF/). Hosted by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts &amp; Humanities Research Institute (https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/).</p>

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Inside the Mind of an AI: Materiality and the Crisis of Representation

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Inside the Mind of an AI: Materiality and the Crisis of Representation

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