Machine Learning and Authorship
Dr Jo Walton (Sussex), online event.
Date: Tuesday 3 May, 6.00-8.30
Dr Jo Walton (Sussex Humanities Lab). This online workshop will explore tools and debates at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and authorship. How is AI being used to generate texts, to attribute authorship, and to obfuscate authorship? How does the increasing sophistication of text generation tools complicate what an ‘author’ is, and what might this mean for how universities identify, assess and nurture learning and intellectual accomplishment? How should we think about bias in training data and outputs, and is “bias” always the best way to frame questions around truth and justice in the use of synthetic text? And do new ways of writing texts mean we also need new ways of reading them?
This will be an exploratory and interactive workshop. It will situate recent ML-based text generation within a much longer history of automated writing, introduce the contemporary landscape, and seek together to glimpse the future. No coding experience is necessary.
Preparation:
Please create a Google account if you don't already have one. Otherwise, no preparation is needed.
Optional reading:
Anne Alexander et al., Ghosts, Robots, and Automatic Writing: An AI Level Study Guide (2050)
Tinmit Gebru et al., On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (2021)
Paolo Oprandi, Authentic Assessments: Using Wikipedia in the University Classroom (2022)
Jesse Stommel, Upgrading: An FAQ (2020)
Optional experimenting: