This course is fully booked (no waiting list)

New forms of Machine Learning, often called Artificial Intelligence, are increasingly challenging not only definitions of human cognition and creativity, but also student writing and peer review. Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 are surprisingly good at generating genre, grammar, and content appropriate texts of short and long length, to the point where general public reports, website and marketing copy, and almost all forms of human communication such as translation can be automated or assisted in by their use. These uses raise ethical, philosophical, and practical questions for the humanities and social sciences. The purpose of this course is to enable students to (1) understand the principles and history of current LLMs and their differences; (2) gain experience with using current LLMs as tools of assistive writing and co-creation; (3) use this experience to analyze bias and produce critical assessments of ethical issues. The course draws on several fields such as anthropology, comparative literature, media studies, philosophy, and linguistics. This is a case-based and research-oriented course that provides participants the opportunity to design individual and team projects. The course provides students with an overall orientation competence in relation to LLMs.