Dartmouth Events

Since the public announcement of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November of 2022, Generative AI has quickly disrupted the operations of the university. These impacts have perhaps been most felt in the classroom. GenAI necessitates rethinking longstanding assumptions and the methods of teaching and learning. Its impact extends beyond classrooms: in the humanities and social sciences, researchers now contend with unstable objects of analysis as AI-generated content circulates alongside human-created works. Yet the technology also offers significant opportunities. GenAI is already embedded in scholarly workflows for writing, coding, information discovery, and analyzing unstructured text. It aids in detecting misinformation, interpreting medical images, and modeling market trends. In these applications and others, GenAI is restructuring knowledge production across the disciplines. In this talk, I’ll discuss these challenges and opportunities and analyze some emergent frameworks and solutions for addressing GenAI and its impact on the university. 

James E. Dobson is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing, Director of Writing Program, and Special Advisor to the Provost for AI. He is a specialist in critical computational studies and literary theory. His scholarship focuses on the history, theory, and technology of computational methods of inquiry, especially as they are applied in the humanities. He has been an influential voice in offering critical appraisal of the algorithmic methods of data analysis at work in digital humanities. Dobson is the author of numerous scholarly articles and three books: Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America, Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology, and The Birth of Computer Vision.