Large Language Models and the Returns of Critical Theory

• 04.12. / 6 – 8 pm / HS3 / Lecture
• Lecture by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (Simon Fraser University)
• Registration is not necessary.

How and why do human values matter to AI? What role do the humanities and social sciences have in understanding and shaping predictive and generative models? These questions are usually answered through the rubric of “ethics and AI,” which presumes that ethics is something that we add to AI to make it better. This also presumes that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and SSAH (Social Science, Arts, and Humanities) are fundamentally different. In contrast, this talk will reveal the importance of SSAH to understand how and why large language models work, as a posthuman writing technology. Drawing from the similarities between models of language from Natural Language Processing and literacy theory, it will outline how SSAH and STEM might work together more deliberately to better understand our current models and build more creative future ones.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is author many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and International Fellow of the British Academy. She has also held fellowships from: the Guggenheim, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), ACLS, American Academy of Berlin, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and