We are collaborating with Shazeda Ahmed (Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice) to organize a series of seminars around the applications of AI to both studying AI as an object of inquiry and discerning the inherent trade-offs in uses of machine learning in research.
Talk by Joshua F. Dienstag, University of Wisconsin-Madison. This talk addresses the challenge that talking machines pose to traditional conceptions of the human is profound. If language activity is crucial to human status, then why should we not include talking machines in our community? What are our grounds for distinguishing computer-generated language from human language?
A two-day workshop held on December 12 and 13, 2024, at UCLA, on the history of human sociality. Entitled ‘Natural Sociability and Political Association: Grounding Contemporary Responses to AI in an Intellectual History of Human Sociality’, the workshop consists in 15 core members composed of faculty and graduate students, who will meet together in 6 sessions, each of 90 minutes, held across two successive days.
Livescu Faculty Seminars where faculty meets to discuss specific topics about the latest research and developments in the field of AI, neuroscience, and sociology, among others. During Fall 2024 quarter we had five meetings with several guests.
Blog post on the model collapse phenomenon. The basic insight is that when AI models generate things—text, images, sound—and then those generated products are used to train a subsequent model, the new model actually gets worse at generating images and texts. Over a few generations it can fail completely, producing only a string of gibberish or a single same image over and over again.
Inaugural workshop held during September 2024 at the Institute for Society & Genetics at UCLA on the topic of midcentury brain science. Cross-fertilizing cultural, political, intellectual, and technical-scientific history, this workshop’s contributions ask: How did the midcentury brain sciences ramify across cultural and political discourses, and simultaneously, how did these discourses shape the technical affordances and practices of these brain sciences?
Talk by Matthew Jones and Chris Wiggins, authors of “How Data Happened”.
Talk by Emily Hogdson Anderson, University of South California titled Ghostwriting: A Secret History of the No Bodies Who Write What is ghostwriting? Understood broadly as the act of one
This May we will hold an inaugural workshop to kick off a new project, “The No-Body-Problem,” developed by Sarah Tindal Kareem (UCLA) and Sean Silver (Rutgers). “The No-Body Problem” names a cluster of concerns that emerge from the proliferation, in the eighteenth century, of new forms of remote media–epistles, periodicals, novels–the very forms of which engaged the question: how do utterances operate differently when there is nobody there to utter them?
