Lecture Antal van den Bosch and Dong Nguyen: Humanities and Artificial Intelligence

On Thursday afternoon, February 16, Antal van den Bosch and Dong Nguyen will give a lecture on the impact of the latest developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence on linguistics and digital humanities. Anyone interested is welcome to sign up!

From their different areas of expertise – Humanities and Science – Antal van den Bosch and Dong Nguyen will offer different perspectives. The general current perspective from the field of Artificial Intelligence on language – one of the most abundant and prominent products of the human mind – can be summarised as ‘an endless stream of very interesting data’. The latest AI developments, Large Language Models such as ChatGPT, implement this view to the hilt – trained on internet-scale amounts of language; their eye-catching capacity as “stochastic parrots” to generate text even seems to have brought Artificial General Intelligence a step closer.

But does this extremely data-driven approach bring answering the grand old theoretical questions on language any closer? What is the role of theory in this data-driven age? And what is the impact of Large Language Models on fields like digital humanities, which are not as ‘question-free’ like these models appear to be?

The CDH lecture Humanities and AI – One answer to a million questions? can be followed on location and online. We encourage anyone who can, to come by on location in the University Library City Centre.