Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 72.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2025-07-03 14:33:33+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk>
        Subject: AI and digital humanities

Many here will know Emily Bender et al, "On the Dangers of Stochastic
Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?"
(https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922). Alan Blackwell has written
about the ethical dimensions of the LLMs powering the artificial
parrots, in Moral Codes (MIT Press). Now we have historian of science
and science writer James Gleick's "The Parrot in the Machine", New York
Review of Books (24 July 2025 issue), with the by-line, "The artificial
intelligence industry depends on plagiarism, mimicry, and exploited
labor, not intelligence". I'd not be surprised if there were not other
items on this topic. Mention of them here would be welcome, I'm sure.

Yesterday, on Radio 4, UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Wes
Streeting, talked about the 'new' government plans to reconstruct the
National Health Service. Prominent in his blather about how everything
healthwise would soon get very much better without bankrupting the U.K.
was the push-button health care about to be 'delivered' by AI. That
'about to be' will bring to some of the older minds here Jerry
Pournelle's phrase "Real Soon Now", but that's not my point. Nor is the
likelihood that this turns out to be an expensive failure in the making.
What concerns me is the abysmal ignorance that allows such blather to
spread without, it seems, any resistance.

Just this morning another example of troubling enthusiasm over AI's 
potential, this time about surveillance of workers in the service industry, 
masked as helpful e.g. to delivery drivers by making sure they receive 
complaints. Here, I take it, the problem is not technical ignorance, rather 
the inability or (deliberate) unwillingness to see beyond the technology 
to the larger world in which it is embedded. Much written about this.

Do we in digital humanities not have a moral obligation to do something
about the ignorance and misapplication of the technology we champion? 
I'm not thinking of political action but of communicating what 
we know in the style of good 'science writing', such as Gleick's or 
Philip Ball's. And that leads me finally to an analogy: as 'AI' is to 
'artificial intelligence' so is 'DH' to 'digital humanities', the former tending
to communicate a thing, the latter a way of understanding or thinking. Is 
there too much of 'DH', too little of 'digital humanities' in what we 
profess?

Comments?

All best,
WM
--
Willard McCarty,
Professor emeritus, King's College London;
Editor, Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts,
   Sciences and Humanities (Berghahn); Humanist
www.mccarty.org.uk


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