Part of the seminar series "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on AI & Culture"
In this session Sandro Pezzelle and Michael F. Miller will reflect on Large Language Models (LLMs) as “interlocutors”. Since their introduction, LLMs have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and, thanks to their effectiveness and availability through user-friendly applications, have achieved unprecedented popularity among a wide audience. At the same time, however, their language behaviour differs from that of human interlocutors. Reflecting on these differences is key in order to properly understand these technologies, their reliability, and (in)consistencies. Furthermore, it could be argued that these models actually collapse traditional distinctions between writing, programming, and generation, while forcing us to examine the theoretical relations between authorship, intentionality, and ultimately life itself.
Sandro Pezzelle Assistant Professor in Responsible AI at the ILLC, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam. Affiliated with the Dialogue Modelling Group. His research combines Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision, and Cognitive Science, and focuses on multimodal language understanding and generation, behavioral and mechanistic interpretability, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying human semantics. He published in ACL, EACL, EMNLP, NAACL, TACL, Cognition, and Cognitive Science. He is a member of the ELLIS society, a faculty member of the ELLIS Amsterdam Unit, and a board member of SigSem, the ACL special interest group in computational semantics.
Michael F. Miller teaches literature and literary theory in the Department of English Language and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. He has published many essays on critical media studies, contemporary Anglophone literature, film, and cultural theory. In 2021 he co-edited Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism (2021), and he is co-editor with Siegfried Zielinski and Aaron Jaffe of the forthcoming Thinking Further with Communicology: Fragments from Vilém Flusser’s Bochum Lectures (Univocal/University of Minnesota Press). He is currently completing a monograph titled Proximity by Proxy: Contemporary Literature in the Age of Social Media, and beginning work on a second book about AI, biopolitics, and cultural production.
You can find an overview of the first edition of the series (2023) here.