About Jill Walker Rettberg:
Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, and Co-Director of the new Center of Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence that will launch in August 2023. Rettberg is the PI of the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life, where she and her team have studied how AI-driven machine vision technologies are represented in art, games and narratives, and how these new technologies affect our culture. Her book Machine Vision: How Algorithms Are Changing the Way We See the World is currently in production with Polity Press and will be published in late 2023. She’s already started writing her next book, which will be titled Loving AI, and will explore the question of why we humans are so fascinated with AI.
Title of keynote:
AI and humans: A love/hate relationship spanning millennia
Abstract: Humans have dreamed of and had nightmares about artificial intelligence for a very long time. From the automatons of ancient Greek myths via Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Asimov’s laws of robotics, our stories of robots have often framed them as enslaved or rebellious: they help humans, but are fundamentally dangerous. Today we see the same narrative repeat in the hype of AI by corporations who use it to make tremendous profits and the critiques from those who rightly point out the deep problems of AI bias, the exploitation of labour and natural resources required to train and maintain AI systems, and the concern that human creativity and labour will be displaced. In this talk Professor Jill Walker Rettberg retells the story of the fraught relationship between humans and AI, moving from historical examples of imagined robots to current “AI imaginaries”, which are moving away from the narrative of the dangerous slave and towards a more collaborative relationship. Ultimately, this love/hate relationship speaks to humans lasting fascination with artificial intelligence. What is it about AI that keeps us so enthralled?