Associated Member of the Excellence Cluster Temporal Communities at Freie Universität Berlin
Perfil no website da Freie Universität Berlin
Roberto Simanowski is an Associated Member of the Excellence Cluster Temporal Communities at Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a Ph.D. in literary studies and a Venia Legendi in media studies and served as Professor of German Studies at Brown University and as Professor of Media Studies at University Basel and City University of Hong Kong. He has published widely on aesthetics, culture, and politics of digital media. His recent publications include Data Love (Columbia University Press 2016), Facebook Society. Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves (Columbia University Press 2018), Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy (Open Humanities Press 2016), Waste. A New Media Primer (MIT Press 2018) and The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas (MIT Press 2018), which received the CHOICE award for Outstanding Academic Titles for 2019, as well as Todesalgorithmus. Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz [Death Algorithm. The dilemma of artificial intelligence] (Passagen Verlag 2020), which received the Tractatus Award for best philosophical essay in German in 2020. Simanowski’s current interest lies in language AI and its impact on communication and value distribution.
Neocolonization by GPT and other less discussed social impacts of AI
The impacts and risks of ChatGPT and NLP-AI in general can be divided into four categories: abuse by bad actors (deepfake, disinformation), necessary adjustments of society (job loss, copyright), technical insufficiency (hallucination), science fiction (AGI). This talk is about a fifth group of effects a technology like NLP-AI has on society, its hidden agenda, or to use a famous phrase in media studies: the message of the medium (McLuhan). Keywords in this group are nudging, bias, colonialism, identity politics, and the ouroboros effect. I will explain the problems associated with these keywords, focusing in particular on the issue of value alignment, which prompts the reactivation of the political and philosophical discussion of universal rights and cosmopolitanism. I will show that with NLP-AI the message of the medium is its content (which only at first glance seems to contradict McLuhan) and that this technology poses a dilemma for society, forcing it to ascribe untenable universal values to this globally operating technology.