AI Archives - Public Seminar

Stop Asking Whether AI Can Write Good

Can I, um, use it at a friend’s house?

March 25, 2026 • by Elvia Wilk

Is it ok to use AI for spell check? What about grammar? Writing image captions? Smoothing transitions between paragraphs? Translating from other languages? Search Engine Optimization? Is my email autoresponder some kind of AI? If I accidentally click an ad for a Large Language Modal (LLM) targeted to me by ...

Artificial Intelligence

What If Using AI Isn’t Cheating?

Meghan O’Rourke’s essay about technology’s uses and abuses makes me wonder if students can help us reinvent the humanities

September 22, 2025 • by Claire Potter

In the last 18 months, publicly available artificial intelligence (AI) programs have turned conversations about the humanities on college campuses into conversations about cheating. Do you remember when life was easy, and all you had to detect was whether a student had purchased a paper or plagiarized portions of it? I ...

Artificial Intelligence

Who Does My Algorithm Think I Am?

A portrait of the author according to her apps

March 11, 2025 • by Marisol Aveline Delarosa

My phone thinks I might have a dopamine addiction. While scrolling social media recently, I paused on a video advertisement depicting a woman scrolling on her phone, lounging on the couch, and slamming down her laptop in frustration. It may as well have been security footage from my own apartment, except ...

Artificial Intelligence

Who’s Afraid of the Large Language Model?

Declining creativity in generative AI

March 27, 2024 • by Chris Holdaway

Whether as a tool for human poets or as a poetic agenda of its own, language models might embody to the truest extent the collision of computer revolution and ancient poiesis....

Who’s Afraid of the Large Language Model?

Artificial Intelligence

The Rise of AI Ethics

The focus on far-off consequences distracts from existing threats to human rights, fairness, justice, equality, and safety

February 21, 2024 • by Peter M. Asaro

AI ethics is not really a distinct field or coherent discourse, but more of an amalgamation of different perspectives considering the potential implications of automated systems and algorithms making decisions with consequential impacts on human lives. ...

Artificial Intelligence

Readers Aren’t Flocking to Chatbot Novels Just Yet

Plus some thoughts on artistic possibilities of A.I. writing

May 24, 2023 • by Lincoln Michel

Let’s assume a future chatbot can live up to the predictions and, say, scan every Stephen King book and then produce a new Stephen King-ish novel. Who does that serve, exactly?...

Readers Aren’t Flocking to Chatbot Novels Just Yet

Past Present

ChatGPT

Past Present Podcast, Episode 363

February 21, 2023 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Neil, Natalia, and Niki discuss ChatGPT....

Science & Technology

What Computers Can Explain

About how humans learn

June 7, 2021 • by Jacob Browning

_____ The mystery of learning is as old as philosophy: how does the nearly insensate newborn become, within just a few years, a walking, talking, intelligent being? In his new book entitled How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, Stanislas Dehaene illuminates the great ...