Artificial Intelligence

Before the session:

Read:

• “What is a Language Model and Why Should You Care?” (Paullada, 2023)
• “Provocations from the Humanities for Generative AI Research” by Lauren Klein, Meredith Martin, André Brock, Maria Antoniak, Melanie Walsh, Jessica Marie Johnson, Lauren Tilton, David Mimno

Optional Readings: Choose one or two

• “From ChatGPT, DALL-E 3 to Sora: How has Generative AI Changed Digital Humanities Research and Services?” (Liu et al., 2024)
• “Bias in Big Data, Machine Learning and AI: What Lessons for the Digital Humanities?” (Prescott, 2023)
• “The AI Con by Emily Bender and Alex Hanna review – debunking myths of the AI revolution” (Steven Poole, The Guardian, 19 May 2025). (Despite the headline, this review does not overlook use cases the author considers “sensible,” but does draw a line between those and the cases that are overhyped for specific reasons of power and money.)

Exploring genAI systems

During the session, we will be doing some hands-on experimentation using ChatGPT and/or Microsoft Copilot. If you have time, try out one or both of these tools. (They can both be used without logging in or creating an account. However, creating a ChatGPT account will give you access to more features, and logging in to Copilot with your Cornell email address will enable certain privacy protections you won’t get with the free version.) What are the similarities and differences between the two AI systems in terms of their features and responses? What do the companies behind them say about the privacy of your data? Can you think of ways to use these tools to help you develop your project?

During the session

• Link to group activity document

After the session

1. Reflection post
2. Pre-work for Thursday sessions
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Further reading

• “ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web” (Chiang, 2023)

• Lee, Hao-Ping (Hank), et al. “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers.” Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 2025, pp. 1–22. ACM Digital Library, https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713778.

• “Chapter 2: Labor” in The Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford, 2021. And actually, the whole book is very good and very readable for understanding the underpinnings of AI logics – even though the book pre-dates ChatGPT.