10.4.2025, 14–17 at HSSH Seminar room 524, Fabianinkatu 24 A, 5th floor (access via door on Fabianinkatu, not courtyard).
This seminar will consider AI, and in particular the recent popularization of large language/image models that invite human prompting (so-called ‘generative AI’), not as a technology, nor as an economic opportunity, but as a sociological phenomenon: specifically, as a social redefinition, or reconstruction, of what counts as knowledge and expertise.
What is strange about this social reconstruction is not that it is happening (which it clearly is), but that it is passing almost without comment, and certainly without much debate. School teachers are being told to use Chat-GPT to write their lesson-plans; school students are becoming encouraged (by Open AI) to use Chat-GPT) to generate their essay drafts; lawyers are, whether with their employers’ approval or not, using GenAI to draft their letters; and UK diplomats are being asked to use AI in their preparations. But no one is asking whether AI generates knowledge, or what sort of output AI is, or whether there might be social costs in using AI in such a general way in social life. Will knowledge institutions (schools, universities, government ministries) be undermined by AI? Or are we simultaneously, and again without debate, renegotiating what our knowledge institutions will look like? What might social theory have to say about these issues?
Prof. Couldry will start the seminar with introductory remarks, for which participants are asked to familiarize themselves with three selected readings (listed below).
Participants are also welcome to prepare short discussion items on issues related to AI and social theory. If you wish to present, please send max 500 word abstract to risto.kunelius@helsinki.fi by Monday April 7. You can participate without an abstract too!
Readings:
Bender, Emily, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell, (2021) ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots : Can Language Models be too Big?’, https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922
Lisa Messeri and Moya Crockett, ‘Artificial intelligence and Illusions of Understanding in Scientific Research’, Nature 2024 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38448693/
Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality (Polity 2016), chapter 7 on Data.
Sign up here:
Please sign up for the seminar through this link.
If you want to participate online send an email to anna.jarske-fransas@helsinki.fi.
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and since 2017 a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of seventeen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books include The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What if it Can’t? (Polity 2024), Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (Penguin/W. H. Allen 2024, with Ulises Mejias), Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019) and Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction (Routledge 2021). Nick is also the co-founder of the Tierra Común network of scholars and activists (https://www.tierracomun.net/).