Image: Michael Dziedzic/Unsplash
Image: Michael Dziedzic/Unsplash
Research project A new transdisciplinary research agenda is emerging concerned with the critical analysis of AI systems and their impact on many different realms of public life. However, within this agenda little has been written on AI and social memory. This is the case even though society’s continuing mediatization, digitalization, and datafication and the growing use of AI systems to learn from the products of these processes is rendering more and more of our everyday lives memory-related or ‘mnemonic’.
Transdisciplinary in nature, the micro-project will involve a new collaboration involving Samuel Merrill (Associate Professor at Umeå University’s Department of Sociology and Centre for Digital Social Research), Rik Smit (Assistant Professor at University of Groningen’s Department of Media Studies) and Thomas Smits (Assistant Professor in Digital History and AI at University of Amsterdam’s Department of History). Within the micro-project the three researchers will collaborate on a co-authored article that investigates how people remember with Large Language Models like ChatGPT.
TAIGA – Centre for Transdisciplinary AI, Umeå University
As countless research papers, books and newspaper articles repeat, the renewed interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing everything. This ‘hype’ is not only the result of actual advances in AI systems but is also down to the marketing efforts of those big tech companies that have recently sought to explore what AI can do with the huge amounts of data and computational resources that they have consolidated over the last decade. At the same time as these industrial AI systems are marketed as potentially solving the challenges currently facing human society, critical scholars have noted that they create their own problems. Meredith Whittaker, director of AI Now - founded in 2017 to study the social implications of AI - recently warned:
‘This is a perilous moment. Private computational systems marketed as artificial intelligence (AI) are threading through our public life and institutions, concentrating industrial power, compounding marginalization, and quietly shaping access to resources and information’ (2021).
Spearheaded by Whittaker and many others, a new transdisciplinary research agenda is emerging concerned with the critical analysis of AI systems and their impact on many different realms of public life. However, within this agenda little has been written on AI and social memory. This is the case even though society’s continuing mediatization, digitalization, and datafication and the growing use of AI systems to learn from the products of these processes is rendering more and more of our everyday lives memory-related or ‘mnemonic’. In a thoroughly mediatized, digitalized, and datafied society, concerns relating to AI controlled access to information are essentially also concerns about AI controlled access to memory.
