Dear colleagues,
Please join the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University and the SUNY Council on Writing in a virtual conference Oct 13-14 entitled "Writing, Thinking, and Learning with AI: Exploring Relationships of Rhetoric and Artificial Intelligence."
The conference convenes on zoom Friday evening, October 13, and runs throughout the day on Saturday the 14th. Almost forty panels and workshops are scheduled in five time slots across the day on Saturday. Well over 100 presenters include teachers and scholars not only from within SUNY, but from across the country and world! We are especially pleased to be joined by our two keynote speakers: on Friday night, Meredith Broussard of New York University; on Saturday morning, Annette Vee of University of Pittsburgh. Their abstracts are included below.
Register now if you plan to attend — registration closes Tuesday, October 10, at 5 pm ET: https://bit.ly/SUNYCoWPWR. Registration is $40 for tenure-track faculty and professionals; $25 for non-tenure track, full-time permanent faculty and professionals; and Free for graduate and undergraduate students and part-time faculty and professionals.
6pm Fri Oct 13
"Confronting Race, Gender, & Ability Bias in Tech"
Meredith Broussard, NYU
What if racism, sexism, and ableism aren’t just glitches in mostly functional machinery—what if they’re coded into our technological systems? In this talk, data scientist and journalist Meredith Broussard explores why neutrality in tech is a myth and how algorithms can be held accountable. Broussard, one of the few Black female researchers in artificial intelligence, explores a range of examples: from facial recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating consequences. Broussard argues that the solution isn’t to make omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. She explores practical strategies to detect when technology reinforces inequality, and offers ideas for redesigning our systems to create a more equitable world.
9am Sat Oct 14
"Can AI writing be good?"
Annette Vee, University of Pittsburgh
One of the central challenges of AI’s encroachment on our creative and communicative practices is its alignment with human values. AI systems such as Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used for decisionmaking, communication, and creativity–which often call for tradeoffs among conflicting values–yet, unlike humans, AI systems have no stake in what they do. How, then, do we align the outputs of AI systems with outputs that humans value? In terms of LLMs, how can we make AI writing good? In this talk, I point to some of the challenges to ethical alignment of AI and suggest how we might use our classroom practices to render AI writing good on the local level. Writing has always been imbricated with ethics and deliberations of the good, from Quintillian’s concept of the orator as a "good [person] speaking well" to John Duffy’s insistence that "writing involves ethical choices." AI writing systems force us to reconsider what good writing is and what responsibilities we have as writers and as teachers. Writing has always meant collaborating with technologies and its future will inevitably include AI. As writing teachers, we can explore with students the ethical engagements of writing, the responsibilities we have to others when we write, and ways to align AI writing to our ethics and values.
Matthew Salzano, Ph.D. (he/him)
IDEA Fellow, Ethical AI, Information Systems, and Data Science and Literacy
School of Communication and Journalism/Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science®
Program in Writing and Rhetoric
matthew.salzano
matthewsalzano.com
Recent: “Bring on the Bots? Preparing Communication Studies for Artificial Intelligence.”