By Ashley Quiroga
Nowadays, machines are so technologically advanced that they can handle problems humans are ordinarily responsible for. But, we should view artificial intelligence in cultural rather than technological terms, a French AI researcher recently told a UC Santa Barbara audience.
“AI belongs as much to the social sciences and humanities as it does to computer science,” said Alexandre Gefen, director of research at France’s National Center for Scientific Research.
Gefen spoke at an event held both on Zoom and in person, co-sponsored by the Comparative Literature Program and the English Department’s Transcriptions Center. The event was organized by English professor Alan Lui, and featured Gefen’s pre-circulated paper, “AI: A Deep History,” followed by responses from UCSB Germanic & Slavic Studies professor Fabian Offert and UCSB English professor Rita Raley.
Alexandre Gefen , an artificial intelligence expert at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, runs the ANR project “CulturIA.”
Gefen is the author of numerous articles and essays on culture, as well as contemporary literature and literature theory. He is also the founder of the literary studies website Fabula.org, and is now the principal investigator of the French Research National Agency (ANR) project CulturIA, which is compiling a cultural history of AI.
Gefen looks at AI in relation to the past, in order to understand the present as well as the future. “Our project team aims to propose a cultural approach to AI, from its ‘prehistory’ to the contemporary development of deep learning, by combining the methods of the history of science, the history of ideas and collective imaginaries with field analyses,” he said.
The best source for the history of AI, according to Gefen, is the beginning paragraphs of Peter Norvig and Staurt J. Russell’s 1995 reference manual, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
But Gefen said the reference work focuses on the creation of AI within cybernetics rather than elaborating on how we can measure scientific dimensions and cultural resonances in terms of human history and society.
Gefen also cited the Global AI Narrative project at Cambridge University, but cautioned that it does not build on an integrated historical narrative – which is the core goal for Gefen’s CulturIA project.
UCSB English professor Alan Lui organized the recent event titled “Generative AI”.
UCSB digital humanities scholar Fabian Offert noted that there is a lack of range when it comes to academically teaching the notion of AI. “There is a general dissatisfaction with the way that research and teaching around AI revolves around a core group of representative texts and a core group of questions,” said Offert.
He joined Gefen in urging researchers to consider the long history of AI, rather than just the contemporary period. The English Department’s Rita Raley further questioned how to imagine the long history of AI from the perspective of the machine – humans thinking like machines – as distinct from the perspective of a human researcher – humans thinking like humans about machines. “How might machine learning aid in the excavation of the long history of AI?” she asked.
The Generative AI event sought to expand our understanding of the history of AI beyond the sciences, asking what the humanities could contribute to the conversation and whether we have adequate models of history to understand AI.
“The urgency of narrating this story and history is important because the relationship between AI and time is particularly rich,” Gefen said. “AI embodies the future of our technologies, but also a kind of end of human time with regard to the advent of external and immortal machines.”
Ashley Quiroga is a fourth-year communication major at UCSB. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class, Digital Journalism.