It is by this point an understatement to note that artificial intelligence is facilitating profound transformations in school, work, and our everyday lives. How might we come to understand all that is at stake for social relations, culture, politics, and even the planet? What would be entailed in a “critical” perspective on AI/machine learning, such that the humanities disciplines have developed for prior sociotechnical situations? What are the critical tools we need to think through these technologies and cultural techniques? The design of the syllabus reflects some of the research questions that are urgent in this moment, but we will think together about how the humanities might develop new theoretical concepts, creative practices, and technical literacies to help advance qualitative engagement with machine learning. As befits our institutional situation (an upper-division seminar in literary studies), we will give more than a little consideration to creative expression and cultural representations. This means thinking about artistic uses of language models, how AI has historically been imagined, and how a cultural imaginary has informed actual research.

–!> No technological knowledge is presumed for this class but students should be prepared for some research and discussion of neural networks and machine learning architectures, with concrete reference to particular large language models and their many applications.