“Fiction has this unprecedented power in tech spaces. The more I started talking to engineers about their technical problems, the more I realized there’s so much more that humanities could offer.”

–Nina Begus

About Nina Begus

Nina Begus is a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, leading a research group on artificial humanities, and the founder of InterpretAI. She is author of Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI, which received an Artificiality Institute Award, and First Encounters with AI.

Website:

ninabegus.com

LinkedIn Profile:

Nina Begus

Book:

Artificial Humanities

What you will learn

How ancient myths and archetypes influence our understanding and design of AI
Why the humanities—literature, philosophy, and the arts—are crucial for developing more thoughtful and innovative AI systems
The dangers of limiting AI concepts to human-centered metaphors and the need for new, more expansive imaginaries
How metaphors shape our interactions with AI products and the user experiences companies choose to enable
The challenges and possibilities of imagining forms of machine intelligence and language beyond human templates
Why collaboration between technical experts and humanists opens new frontiers for creativity and responsible technology
What makes writing and artistic creation uniquely human, and how AI amplifies—not replaces—these impulses
Practical ways artists, engineers, and thinkers can work together to explore new relationships and futures with AI

Episode Resources

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Nina, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

Nina Begus: Thank you for having me.

Ross Dawson: You’ve written this very interesting book, Artificial Humanities, and I think there’s a lot to dig into. But what does that mean? What do you mean by artificial humanities?

Nina Begus: Well, this was really a new framework that I’ve developed while I was working on the relationship between AI and fiction, and I started working on this about 15 years ago when I realized that fiction has this unprecedented power in tech spaces. So this is how it all started, but then the more I started talking to engineers about their technical problems, the more I realized there’s so much more that humanities could offer in this collaborative, generative approach that I’ve developed.

I would say that now, as the field stands, it’s really a way to explore and demonstrate how humanities—as broad as science and technology studies, literary studies, film, philosophy, rhetoric, history of technology—how all of these fields can help us address the most pressing issues in AI development and use. And it’s been important to me that this approach uses traditional humanistic methods, theory, conceptual work, history, ethical approaches, but also that it’s collaborative and exploratory and experimental in this way that you can look back into the past and at the present to make a more informed choice about the future. You can speculate about different possibilities with it.

Ross Dawson: Well, art is an expression of the human psyche, or even more, it is the fullest expression of humanity, and that’s what art tries to do. Also, I’m a deep believer in archetypes, human archetypes, and things which are intrinsic to who we are, and that’s something which you can only really uncover through the arts.

Now we have arguably seen all these archetypes play out in real time, these modern myths being created right now in the stories being told of how AI is being created. So I think it’s extraordinarily relevant to look back at how we have depicted machines through our history and our relationship to them.

Nina Begus: Yes, this is the reason why I started exploring this topic, actually, because there were so many ancient myths, these archetypal narratives that I’ve seen at the same time, both in technological products that were coming to the market and in the way technologists were thinking about it, and also in fictional products and films and novels in the way we imagined AI. I framed my book around the Pygmalion myth, but there are many, many other myths—Prom...

Nina Begus on artificial humanities, AI archetypes, limiting and productive metaphors, and human extension (AC Ep38)