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Lecture: Ted Chiang

The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art

Award-winning author Ted Chiang gives a lecture as part of the "Humanities for AI" series presented by The Princeton University Center for Digital Humanities and its partners.

About Ted Chiang (Photo by Alan Berner):

Ted Chiang's fiction has won four Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, six Locus Awards, and the PEN/Malamud Award and has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories. His first collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has been translated into twenty-one languages, and the title story was the basis for the Oscar-nominated film Arrival. The New York Times chose his second collection, Exhalation, as one of the 10 Best Books of 2019. As a 2023 TIME100 Most Influential Person in AI, Chiang is described as “perhaps the world’s most celebrated living science-fiction author.” 

About "Humanities for AI:"

This event is part of “Humanities for AI” — a series of projects, initiatives, and conversations that centers humanities values and approaches in the development, use, and interpretation of the field broadly known as AI.

While the discourse around AI often prioritizes innovation and acceleration, a humanistic perspective highlights continuities, explores context, and fosters critical engagement with algorithms, systems, data, and tools. At a time when the scale of AI is increasingly large, a humanistic approach values attention to smaller scales and a more deliberate pace. Humanities for AI seeks to equalize our understanding of technology with an extensive, and user-friendly, understanding of traditional humanities research topics. Just as we are experts in introducing computational thinking to humanities researchers, we are now committed to introducing humanistic thinking to researchers in AI.

Presented in partnership with Princeton University's Center for Digital Humanities, the Humanities Initiative "Media and Meaning" project, and the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intellgence (AI Lab) and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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