“Recognizing the influence that popular narratives have on our collective perceptions, a growing number of AI and computer science experts now want to harness fiction to help imagine futures in which algorithms don’t destroy the planet. The arts and humanities, they argue, must play a role to ensure AI serves human goals.
To that end, Nina Beguš, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, advocates for a new discipline that she calls the “artificial humanities.” In her upcoming book Artificial Humanities: A Fictional Perspective on Language in AI,she contends that the “responsibility of making these technologies is too big for the technologists to bear it alone.” The artificial humanities, she explains, would fuse science and the arts to leverage fiction and philosophy in the exploration of AI’s benevolent potential.
Entertainment strongly shapes people’s perceptions of AI, as a recent public opinion study by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin shows. These depictions, however, frequently ignore positive technological potential in favor of portraying our worst fears. “We need fictional works that consider machines for what they are and articulate what their intelligence and creativity could be,” Beguš says. And because fiction is “not obliged to mirror actual technological developments,” it can be a “public space for experimentation and reflection.”
Importantly, it also turns out that our entertainment-fueled negative impressions of AI can, in turn, influence how the technology performs in the real world; the stories we tell ourselves about AI prime us to use it in certain ways. Preconceptions that an AI chatbot will answer like a manipulative machine initiate a hostile feedback loop so that the bot acts as expected, according to a recent study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. A user’s internalized fears can be self-fulfilling, seasoning an algorithm with adversarial ingredients. So it may be that if fiction trains us to expect the worst from AI, that’s exactly what we’ll get.
To pull more artists and thinkers into that discussion, the Future of Life Institute has sponsored multiple initiatives linking fiction writers and other creatives with technologists. “You can't mitigate risks that you can’t imagine,” Javorsky says. “You also can’t build positive futures with technology and steer toward those if you’re not imagining them.” The institute’s Worldbuilding Competition, for example, brings together multidisciplinary teams to conceptualize various friendly-AI futures.
“We need to come up with a new story,” says Pat Pataranutaporn, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab and a co-author of the study on AI user preconceptions. “Why do we always imagine science fiction to be a dystopia? Why can’t we imagine science fiction that gives us hope?”
Janneke Blijlevens Meg Elkins
