Speaker: Prof Claire Warwick, Durham University
Abstract: Narratives about AI tend to be expressed in extremes. Overblown hype generated by tech companies is balanced by narratives of doom in the media. The policy narrative seems polarised between a desire to drive growth through ubiquitous AI, while at the same time portraying the most ubiquitous form of digital technology, social media, as a medium whose potential for harm rivals that of tobacco.
But what do we know about how people use AI and what they think of it in a professional or scholarly context? A well-publicised study from the Harvard Business school suggests that its benefits in the workplace have not yet been proven. A study of readers of poetry suggests that participants could not tell the difference between poems written by humans and by AI. But they liked them less if they thought they were written by AI. Meanwhile social media users complain about the dominance of AI slop, suggesting that they have imbibed the negative messages about AI that are so prevalent on the press.
Yet, at the same time, stories emerge of the way in which humans are interacting with chatbots. We ask them for advice on dating and health, use them as digital therapists, wedding planners or tour guides. Sometimes the results of this can be tragic. Yet this behaviour also speaks to a human propensity to create relationships with anything that appears to be able to communicate. Intriguingly, one of the very few studies about how humanities scholars use GenAI suggests that one of the most common uses is to test out new research ideas, in the digital equivalent of bouncing ideas off a colleague. The level of trust and relationship building here is remarkably high. This should not surprise us, since one of the things we are sure of is that users will adopt technology if it suits their needs. They also don’t care how the technology works, as long as the interface is simple and useful. Hence the popularity of GenAI.
In this short presentation, therefore, I will be discussing what we know about the users of AI, in particular GenAI and how this relates to older knowledge about users of digital technologies. I will also consider the way in which humans tend to create relationships with non-human entities, and what this can tell us about potential futures for AI adoption.
Bio: Claire Warwick is a Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of English at Durham University. Her research is concerned with the way that digital resources, including artificial intelligence techniques, are used in the humanities and cultural heritage and in reading behaviour in physical and digital spaces. She has recently completed a monograph: Digital Humanities and the Cyberspace Decade: A World Elsewhere. She has led and co-investigated several digital humanities research projects, including the AEOLIAN network, which considered the potential for the application of AI to archives and cultural heritage. She collaborates widely, especially with researchers in Canada and the USA and gave the closing plenary lecture for the DH2016 conference. She has served on various advisory boards in digital humanities, for example the British Library’s BL Labs and was a member of the Conseil Scientifique du Campus Condorcet in Paris.
She was previously Pro-Vice-Chancellor: Research at Durham from 2014- 2019 and served as chair of the Russell Group PVCRs working group. Before coming to Durham, she was Head of UCL Department of Information Studies, and director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and began her academic career as a lecturer at Sheffield University’s iSchool. Her PhD, from Cambridge, was in English Literature, followed by a postdoctoral position at Oxford University’s Humanities Computing Unit and Faculty of English.
She has supervised PhDs on a range of topics in digital humanities, including web comics, digital newspapers, digital novels and digital publishing more generally, and the use of data science techniques for museum engagement. She would welcome enquiries from potential PhD students or visiting scholars wishing to work on a topics relevant to the application of digital techniques to literary studies, and to the humanities and cultural heritage more broadly, or to the study of digital phenomena, such as social media or AI.