This course explores the impact of AI on the humanities and seeks to articulate a humanities-based perspective on AI. This double mission includes discussions of how AI uses text corpora; how it imitates existing genres and styles; and larger questions of creativity and authorship. We’ll also look at the history of dialogue in order to understand our interactions with AI though conversational interfaces or chats. This attention to dialogue will include source texts such as the Socratic dialogues, Buddhist Sutras, and Confucian Analects, as well as theoretical readings by Nina Beguš, Murray Shanahan, and others.

At the same time, this course functions as a lab in which we’ll try out different applications of AI in a humanities context. We will develop different uses of AI as an analytical tool, as a research tool, and as a sparring partner as well as AI-enabled coding tools that can help create humanities-based websites and apps (no coding experiences required). This part is aimed at those eager to engage with AI in an experimental or entrepreneurial mode. We’ll look at recent projects such as Blinkist, Stoa, and other humanities-based applications.

An additional goal of the course is to create the contours of a humanities-based AI Lab that participants can continue to use for their own projects after  the course is over.