CHAISE
Artificial intelligence is advancing in both in its technical capacities and in its embeddedness in human life. In line with some previous digital advances in computation such as the development of the (mis)information capacities of the internet, the widespread use of AI has immediate, far-reaching consequences; but more than those previous technologies, AI can be seen as altering our sense of humanity’s place in the world and of our relations to one another. Generative AI in text and video formats enables great harms and erodes our sense that we occupy a shared reality in a common moral and epistemic community. But, at the same time, the capacities of AI invite us to consider expanding our moral universe to include non-human agents with capacities that in some cases might outstrip our own. Ethical concerns are continuously publicly raised, and they range widely from issues in resource consumption to the production of deepfaked sexualized images of minors to immoral and illegal “advice” offered by LLMs to the use of AI agents to inform decisions in war. But far less frequently are questions of the very moral meaning of artificially intelligent “agents” raised—what does it mean for an LLM to serve as a proxy for a dead loved one or for an AI agent to “decide” humanly important matters in healthcare and warfare? Where does the AI end and the human begin?
For these issues, scholars across the range of humanities and humanistically-informed social sciences are crucial voices for responsible academic research into and public debate regarding AI. Dr. Fellows has partnered with a number of other scholars in the humanities and social sciences across British Columbia to create CHAISE (The centre for AI scholarship and education). The goal of CHAISE is to bring humanistically-informed research to the BC (and Canadian) public, in order to help inform and enrich the conversation on generative AI. It is important to consider not only what AI can do for us, but also what it does to us, and through us.
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