Jill Walker Rettberg. 
Generative AI: from Machine Vision to AI Stories

In this lecture Jill Walker Rettberg will present her research on the aesthetics and cultural implications of generative AI. She will begin with her work on machine vision technologies, discussing issues of bias in the technology but with a focus on how the technology is dependent on its cultural contexts and on imaginaries and our desires and fears of what technology can do. Next, Rettberg will discuss her new project, AI STORIES: Narrative Archetypes for Artificial Intelligence, which will test the hypothesis that language models are identifying narrative structures in the training data and replicating these in their output. Examples of such structures include the narrative need for a conflict followed by a resolution, or the pattern of the hero going on a journey and meeting an opponent and a helper, or that if a contract is made (do not open the seventh door!) it will be broken (the princess will definitely open that door). If there are cultural differences between narrative structures – Bollywood movies vs Hollywood movies, for instance, or the collective resolution of many Scandinavian stories vs the individual hero/villain of American stories – then this could mean that generate AI creates a new kind of AI bias that is deeper than the type developers are already trying to address – a narrative bias. Does generative AI threaten cultural diversity? Do we risk losing our stories?

Bio: Jill Walker Rettberg is professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, where she leads the node on social media and networked narratives. She also leads the project AI STORIES, which is funded by an ERC Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. Jill's most recent book is Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World (Polity 2023).

• Program, Æstetisk Seminar E2024
• Plakat, Æstetisk Seminar E2024

Æstetisk Seminar E2024 er tilrettelagt af Christiane Særkjær og Jan Løhmann Stephensen, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.