Humanities and Artificial Intelligence: Resources

Below is a list of readings related to humanities and artificial intelligence. The list includes a mix of recent and less recent works as well as a mix of material published in academic and more popular venues. We do not aim for completeness and as this is a fast evolving field, we don’t expect to have the most up to date materials. We are aiming to provide some resources that are accessible to non-specialists and that provide a sense of the range of avenues to explore when thinking about the humanities and artificial intelligence.

AI and the Humanities

•  John Tasioulas, “The Role of the Arts and Humanities in Thinking about AI" (Ada Lovelace Institute)
• Shannon Vallor, "Mobilising the Intellectual Resources of the Arts and Humanities" (Ada Lovelace Institute)
• Alison Powell, "Otherwises, and the Contribution of the Arts and Humanities to Ethical AI" (Ada Lovelace Institute)
• Interview with David Greene, President of Colby College, "Should every B.A. include some AI?" (Marketplace)
• Ethan Mollick, "Magic for English Majors" (Substack)
• Yehuda Leibler, "Why the Rise of AI Requires Revitalizing the Humanities," (Entrepreneur)

How AI Works, with a Special Focus on Large Language Models

• Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019)
• Stephen Wolfram, "What is ChatGPT Doing... And Why does it Work?" (Wolfram Blog)
• Ted Chiang, "ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web," (The New Yorker) 
• Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, & Schmargaret Schmitchell,  “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models be too Big?" (Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency) 
• Elizabeth Weil, “You are Not a Parrot" (New York Magazine) 

ChatGPT in Colleges

• "Critical AI: Adapting College Writing for the Age of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT: Some Next Steps for Educators" (Critical AI)
• Owen Kichizo Terry, "I'm a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We're Using ChatGPT" (Chronicle of Higher Ed)
• "Vanderbilt University Apologizes for Using ChatGPT to Write a Mass-Shootimg Email" (CNN)
• Tim Laquintano, Carly Schnitzler, and Annette Vee eds., TextGenEd: An Introduction to Teaching with Text Generation Technologies

Value Alignment & Algorithmic Bias

• Stuart Russell, Human Incompatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (Penguin, 2020)
• Kevin Roose, "Bing's AI Chat: 'I Want to be Alive'" (New York Times) 
• Geoffrey Hinton, PBS television interview on the dangers that AI raises
• Billy Perigo, "Bing's AI is Threatening Users. That's No Laughing Matter" (Time) 
• Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press, 2018)
• Arvind Narayan, "The Limits of the Quantitative Approach to Discrimination," (2022 James Baldwin lecture, Princeton)
• Kathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Broadway Books, 2016)  
• "Machine Bias" (ProPublica)
•  "Can you make AI fairer than a judge? Play our courtroom algorithm game" (MIT Technology Review)
• "AI Reveals its Biases by Generating What it Thinks Professors Look Like" (PetaPixel)
• Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St Martin's Press, 2018)
• Regina Rini, "Deepfakes and the Epistemic Backstop" (Philosopher's Imprint)
• "People are trying to claim real videos are deepfakes. The courts are not amused" (NPR)
• "Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence"

Art and Creativity

• 'What will Artificial Intelligence do to Us?" (Current Affairs)
• "This artist is dominating AI-generated art. And he’s not happy about it." (MIT Technology Review)
• "I used generative AI to create pictures of painting robots, but I’m not the artist — humanity is" (Big Think)
• "This Film Does Not Exist" (NY Times) 
• "An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy." (NY Times) 
• "An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World" (NY Times)