Speaker: Nupoor Ranade (she/her), Assistant Professor, Department of English, George Mason University

Abstract: In this presentation, I will discuss practical ways of engaging in ethical AI development using approaches such as Human-centered design, Human-in-the-loop for AI augmentation and AI Transparency. The humanities and AI are two fields that have traditionally been seen as separate and distinct. However, in recent years, there has been a growing interest in the intersection of these two fields. This is due in part to the increasing sophistication of AI systems, which are now capable of performing tasks that were once thought to be the exclusive domain of humans such as writing and editing especially for creative purposes. Another aspect is the rising ethical concerns about AI technology and its impact on society. Humanities scholars like technical communicators can get involved in the research on AI ethics in different ways. Some of those are as follows: they can collaborate with technical experts to help breakdown complex concepts for easier interpretability, they can use their community engagement skills for user and public advocacy, they can use critical methods to evaluate the ethical impact of AI to check for biases, and so on. By getting involved in this research, humanities scholars can provide practical ways of guiding the development and operability of AI in more ethical ways that benefit the society. I discuss 5 projects (out of which 2 are in-progress) that describe such practical ways of engaging with AI technology.