Join Us: A Roundtable on Machine Predictions and Synthetic Text
2 October 2021
Two co-authors of the much discussed “Stochastic Parrots” paper will be in conversation with three leading DH scholars on October 26 at 4:30 pm. We hope you will join us virtually!
Since it was published in March 2021, “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” has sparked impassioned conversations on the unintended consequences and potential harms of prominent natural language processing (NLP) projects. While this groundbreaking paper has been influential in computer and data science—prompting reflection on the dangers of relying on poorly conceptualized and curated data—it is only beginning to be discussed by humanities scholars who use NLP methods in their research.
Join us on Zoom on October 26 at 4:30 pm (Eastern) for a conversation between two co-authors of the paper—Angelina McMillan-Miller (University of Washington) and Margaret Mitchell (Ethical AI LLC)—and three leading digital humanities scholars: Gimena del Rio Riande (University of Buenos Aires), Lauren F. Klein (Emory University), and Ted Underwood (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Together, they will discuss how the co-authors’ attention to process (data gathering, documentation, standards) and ethics in AI can be turned to humanists creating data and models for the study of literature, history, and culture. Toma Tasovac (DARIAH-EU) will moderate the discussion.
Make sure to register in advance for the event!
The roundtable is part of the NEH-funded New Languages for NLP project and is co-sponsored by Princeton’s Center for Statistics and Machine Learning and DARIAH-EU.
Carousel photo by Ilona Frey on Unsplash.