UiB AI #3: Narratives and imaginaries of artificial intelligence

Imagination and narrative are increasingly central in debates around artificial intelligence. On the one hand, expectations and worries about AI are foreshadowed in science fiction narratives. On the other, machine learning models trained on large datasets of images and texts are increasingly adept at generating content that looks like something a human might produce. You can set up a free account at OpenAI and type a prompt into their Playground, or use DALL-E mini to instantly generate images based on a written prompt. On online platforms, machine learning algorithms serve us the news, music, videos and memes they think we want to see. And through consumer interfaces, conversational agents and recommender systems shape the work of artists, creators and storytellers. 

How do we imagine AI? How does AI imagine us? What imaginaries and narratives result from this interplay? This panel debate brings together four UiB scholars who study the interplay between AI imaginaries and narratives from different perspectives.  

Scott Rettberg, professor of Digital Culture, has just received funding from the Norwegian Research Council for the project Extending Digital Narratives, which will explore emerging genres of storytelling including AI generated narratives and conversational agents. 

Gabriele de Seta, a media anthropologist who won the 2022 Prize of Young Researchers in the Humanities, will discuss his current work on machine vision imaginaries and folk theories of algorithms. 

Marianne Gunderson will talk about her work on how users talk about feeling «seen» by the TikTok algorithm, which many users talk about as though it understands them even better than other humans do.  

The debate will be led by Jill Walker Rettberg, professor of Digital Culture and leader of the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life.