Join us with Dr. Damien Patrick Williams, University of North Carolina Charlotte as we discuss our world has become increasingly entangled with so-called artificial intelligence— systems which seem to replicate human speech and thought, and which we are told will make our lives easier, more efficient, and more interesting. But what do these tools and systems actually do, and how do they do it? And why are we so willing if not downright eager to integrate them into every facet of our daily lives, even when we know their content bears little to no relationship to facts or truth? Here, we will discuss the historical origins and sociotechnical implications of generative pretrained transformers, as well as other forms of "AI." We'll examine what has already happened and what can potentially go wrong when we integrate "AI" into various aspects of our lives; and we'll dig into what our increasing reliance on these systems, as they're currently formulated, does to our claims to and processes of generating knowledge. Neither "AI" qua "AI" nor the forms these tools and systems currently tend to take are inevitable, but in order to change them, we must understand what they truly do, are, and could be.
