Center Research
We believe that research focused on AI’s social and cultural dimensions is urgently needed, and that the humanities are uniquely placed to explore AI’s complex value trade-offs (concerning, for example, trustworthiness, transparency and privacy) and understand its potentially unprecedented conceptual and societal transformations.
On the one hand, AI is a rapidly developing technology, whose ultimate capabilities remain uncertain. AI’s developing nature greatly increases uncertainty in central areas of human life — such as employment and decision-making within political institutions — which considered together greatly increase the uncertainty of humanity’s future trajectory. The many forms of uncertainty related to AI’s potential impact have resulted in widespread disagreement about how best to mitigate potential harms associated with AI.
On the other hand, the deployment of AI in decision-making can create the perception that its decision-making is less susceptible to uncertainty and error. Empirical research on automation bias shows that human decision-makers interacting with AI are prone to placing an unduly high degree of trust in the accuracy or truth of algorithmic outputs, on the grounds that AI-assisted decisions are perceived as necessarily more objective and neutral than human decisions.
Over the coming years, we will focus on questions about three topics relevant to AI’s relationship with uncertainty: knowledge, creativity, and power.
AI&U advances our understanding of AI through three kinds of projects: (1) fellows’ individual research; (2) an annual whitepaper; and (3) a semi-annual public forum. Each year, the Center selects a team of internal faculty fellows, a graduate researcher, and an external fellow to pursue research at UW-Madison. In their year at The Center, each fellow pursues their own research project and participates in the intellectual culture of the Center, assisting each other’s research, contributing to weekly meetings with other fellows, and ultimately collaborating on the publication and dissemination of the Center’s whitepaper. Their whitepaper is the culmination of the fellows’ research into AI over the past year and seeks to synthesize their disciplinary perspectives into a shared set of ideas about the relationship between AI and the year’s theme. The public forum provides the broader public an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the Center’s research while also learning from non-academic voices, such as community organizations and industry leaders.
Each year, the fellows will collaborate on a whitepaper addressing the questions and problems related to that year’s theme that they found most urgent. Given the fluidity and the fast-paced dynamism around AI developments, The Center’s whitepaper will help map important conceptual and evaluative questions and issues related to AI, ensuring that the skills developed through humanistic inquiry contribute to the larger debates taking place around AI in academia and among the public. Over time, these whitepapers will enable The Center’s research to remain responsive to recent AI developments while cultivating a corpus of knowledge so that each cohort of fellows does not have to start afresh to advance AI&U’s mission.
The first year of the Center’s research (2026) focuses on questions about AI and its relationship to knowledge. Some of the key questions we explore are:
What are the limits of trusting AI outputs? How can the meaning of AI outputs be effectively communicated to and between human agents interacting with AI? Can AI help ameliorate problems like fake news and echo chambers rather than amplifying them? How important (if at all) is it for AI to develop reasoning capabilities that approximate human capabilities?
The second year of the Center’s research (2027) will focus on the questions about AI and its relationship to creativity. Some of the key questions we will explore are:
When generative AI produces an artistic output, who is the author? Can AI be creative, or is creativity a distinctively human capability that is necessarily inaccessible to artificial agents? Does the fact that AI generated a piece of artwork alter its aesthetic value? Is AI art objectionable in ways akin to plagiarism, or is it more innocuous, like sampling music?
The third year of the Center’s research (2028) will focus on the questions about AI and its relationship to power. Some of the key questions we will explore are:
Who can and who should decide when to delegate socially important decisions to AI? What does it mean for AI to be just? How should we adjudicate between competing views of justice about which significant disagreement persists? Are there aspects of human life that should never be automated? How does automation replicate power inequalities linked to race, gender, and other features?
Each calendar year, the Center selects 4 fellows from with UW-Madison’s faculty, and each academic year, the Center selects a UW-Madison graduate researcher and an external faculty fellow. As an intellectual community, our fellows collaborate on the Center’s annual research theme and whitepaper.
If you qualify for any of these positions and want to contribute to a humanistic understanding of AI, we would love to work with you! For more information about our fellowships, you can explore our application requirements from previous years and stay tuned for additional details on our upcoming application cycle. For all correspondence about the Center, please contact our Faculty Director, Jeremy Morris: jwmorris2@wisc.edu