More than just an appointment, an inaugural lecture is a public declaration of a scholar’s commitment: the questions that animate their research and the intellectual territory they seek to explore. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College London is very pleased to invite you to the inaugural lecture by Professor Mercedes Bunz, Professor of Digital Culture and Society in the Faculty of Digital Humanities.
Professor Bans’ scholarship occupies a rare and demanding position at the intersection of critical theory, media studies, and the technical realities of modern AI systems, and she brings to that encounter the conceptual precision of the humanities, her deep curiosity about the technical, and her rejection of easy answers.
In his lecture “Culture as Computation,” Professor Bans addresses one of the most important intellectual challenges of our time. Drawing on contemporary AI safety research from leading AI research institutes, she argues that the language produced by large-scale language models is not just human language reproduced by machines. That’s totally interesting. If the 20th century humanities analyzed symbolic culture, she argues, the challenge for the 21st century humanities is to understand vector culture and how meaning emerges differently when language becomes computational.
At a time when AI systems are at the center of ecological, geopolitical, and informational upheavals, this lecture argues that humanistic analyzes of meaning-making by machines are not incidental to the current crisis, but can play a central role in and through the crisis.
We warmly welcome your participation.
The lecture will be streamed live. If you would like to participate remotely, please select “Live Streaming Ticket” at checkout.
abstract
The language produced by ChatGPT and other large-scale language models is more than just human language reproduced by a machine. It’s more consequential. Vans examines why aligning AI systems with human values remains a difficult challenge, drawing on examples from contemporary AI safety research, including research on safety practices and interpretability by leading AI research institutions. At the same time, efforts to control harmful output reveal something deeper about the future of computed languages and those of us who use them.
If the 20th century humanities were interested in “symbolic culture,” the challenge for the 21st century humanities is to understand “vector culture.” What does it mean for meaning to emerge from AI systems and their computations? What exactly is changing? While AI systems are at the center of the ecological, geopolitical, and informational crises that define our present, this lecture suggests that analyzing the meaning-making of AI systems and understanding their internal logic can also help us imagine new ways forward.
