The WSU Humanities Center invites faculty, students, staff, and the community to a symposium sponsored by a Humanities Center Working Group on, The Humanities and Untested Technologies: The Question of Artificial Intelligence.

Symposium Program 

9:00 - 9:30 am  Coffee and Conversation 

9:30 - 9:45 am  Welcome Remarks and Introduction  

Yasemin Gencer (AI in the Humanities Working Group, Department of Art, Art History, and Design) 

10:00 - 11:15 am  Session I  

- Thiago Krause, Department of History/African-American Studies, “Augmentation or Atrophy? LLMs the Historian’s Craft, and the Risk of Deskilling” 

- Sylvia Taschka, Department of History, “The Humanities and Untested Technologies: The Question of Artificial Intelligence” 

- Steven Winter, Law School, “The Artificial in ‘Artificial Intelligence’” 

Haiyong Liu, Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (CMLLC), “AI and Linguistic Context” 

- Paul Echeverria, Department of Art, Art History, and Design, “Inventions Without a Future: Notes on Cinema as Artificial Intelligence” 

11:30 - 12:30 pm   Lunch Break  

Box lunches provided, courtesy of the Humanities Center 

12:45 - 1:45 pm  Session II 

Topic of “Adapting and Adopting across our Discipline: Library of Information Sciences School of Information Sciences” 

- Shannon Oltmann, Associate Dean of the School of Information Sciences 

- Joan Beaudoin, Department of University Libraries, “Does AI Help Description?” 

- Kafi Kumasi, School of Information Sciences, “The Challenges of AI from the School Librarian’s Perspective” 

- Xiangmin Zhang, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, “The Shift from Responsible AI to the Responsible Use of AI” 

1:45 - 3:00 pm  Keynote Presentation and Q&A 

Ali Alkhatib (CV and research),  “The Uncanny Pessimism of Techno-Optimism” 

All Day 

Artworks, Literature, and Other Materials 

- “botzine” zines by Angela Berkley (Sweetland Writing Center, Department of English, University of Michigan) will be on display and available for visitors and participants 

- Student and Faculty “AI Use” Surveys  

-“Stop the Data Center” flyers from Southeast Michigan People's Movements 

- Informational Handouts and zines 

This symposium seeks to explore AI’s capabilities and limitations from the perspective of the Humanities. Speakers will consider how faculty, staff, and students mis/use, and mis/understand AI and AI-adjacent products and foster conversations to better understand and document the adoption/rejection of this technology as it enters popular culture.