Hannah Wise was awarded a bursary to attend the Digital Humanities Oxford Summer School in 2024. To join the mailing list and learn about the next summer school sign up here. Read about Hannah's experience at the summer school here:
Having worked in academic libraries for 15 years, I am facing the impending influx of AI technology with a mixture of excitement and nervousness. Which is why I was delighted to be awarded a bursary for the Oxford Digital Summer School, AI and Creative Tech strand. My hope was that my understanding of AI would be deepened, and I would glean a greater understanding of all the new, developing technologies that might soon become part of our day to day work.
What I wasn’t expecting to learn was just how far back the history of AI goes. Hearing that the term was first joined in 1956 by the Dartmouth Summer Research project and that academics such as Professor David De Roure have been researching and working in this field for most of his career, made me see this technology in a new light.
I also wasn’t expecting to learn just how closely the rigid face of AI has been intertwined with the more fluid reputation of creative arts. For example, we learned about pieces of music that have been created via an emulator and an Ada Lovelace quote. How when faced with a mixture of Bach and AI trained on Bach, an audience was unable to tell which parts of the composition had been written by which author. How researchers are using AI to bring back ancient cities through XR and all the potential issues around technological decay and obsolescence this brings up.
The presentations had a mostly unspoken but underlying theme around authorship and job security. Afterall if AI composes a piece of music, who is the author? The musician the AI was trained on, the writer of the code, the AI itself? This seemed a pertinent question at a time when AI is in particular seen to be a threat to the careers of those in the creative industry.
However, the take away from those discussions was one of hope. That AI will not be here to take away jobs. But rather to take away the tedious parts of the jobs, freeing up people to concentrate on the most creative, challenging and in depth parts involved in those career paths. And of course, we’re very much still at a time when AI needs help. Anyone who has ever asked ChaptGPT to count the numbers of “r”s in the word strawberry, knows this. And it can also be seen in AI and human collaborations such as the Galaxy Zoo: Euclid project, a Zooniverse where thousands of volunteers helped train AI in galaxy identification.
Overall the Summer School was engaging, stimulating and thought provoking in ways I hadn’t expected. I have already brought knowledge I learned on the course into my day to day work and the quality and variety of talks on offer was impressive in such a short amount of time. Being able to attend remotely, also allowed for a greater work life balance and I still very much felt like an included attendee at the event. I look forward to seeing what is on offer next year and how far this particular topic has developed.
