Thank you to Princeton Public Library for making this recording available.
A diverse set of voices from the tech industry, journalism, the arts, and higher education will discuss how ChatGPT, and generative AI more broadly, will alter how we define, understand, and practice creativity in the future.
The panel features:
Min Li Chan, essayist, technologist, Alphabet/Google alum
Rishi Jaitly, Distinguished Fellow, Virginia Tech’s Center for Humanities, Twitter/Google/YouTube alum
Edward Jones-Imhotep, director, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto
Min Li Chan is an essayist and technologist based in Oakland, California. Her essays have appeared in The Yale Review, New England Review, The Point Magazine, and BuzzFeed, and she is currently at work on a collection of essays on art, algorithms, language, and precarity in contemporary technological life. She is a recipient of the 2018 BuzzFeed Emerging Writers Fellowship and a finalist for Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s inaugural Writer’s Fellowship. As a technologist in Silicon Valley, she has worked on speculative technologies from self-driving cars to tools for citizen cartography. Min Li was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Rishi Jaitly Professor of Practice and Distinguished Humanities Fellow
Rishi Jaitly
Professor of Practice and Distinguished Humanities Fellow
Rooted in place and guided by service, Rishi Jaitly is a leading advocate of the humanities with uncommon entrepreneurial, international and executive experience at the intersection of technology, media and civics. Presently, Jaitly is a Professor of Practice and Distinguished Humanities Fellow at Virginia Tech. He also founded and leads Virginia Tech’s Institute for Leadership in Technology, an effort to offer a new Executive Humanities Certificate to rising leaders in the technology landscape. Earlier in his career, he was the Founding CEO of venture firm Times Bridge, Twitter’s Vice President for Asia Pacific & Middle East, the Founder of Michigan Corps, the Detroit Director of the Knight Foundation, the public policy lead for College Summit and Google in South Asia and a speechwriter to Google’s Chairman and CEO. Jaitly earned his A.B. in history from Princeton University, where he later served as a Trustee, and presently serves on the Boards of Virginia Humanities and the National Humanities Center.
Edward Jones-Imhotep Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Edward Jones-Imhotep
Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Edward Jones-Imhotep is Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. A historian of the social and cultural life of machines, he writes about topics ranging from the history of music studios and of artificial life to space technologies and the technological geographies of islands. His research is particularly interested in histories of technological failure — breakdowns, malfunctions, accidents — and what they reveal about the place of machines and the stakes of machine failures in the culture, politics, and economics of modern societies. His first book, The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War (MIT Press, 2017), won the Sidney Edelstein Prize for the best scholarly book in the field of history of technology. He is currently finishing a second book, Reliable Humans/Trustworthy Machines, examining how people from the late-18th to the mid-20th centuries understood machine failures as a problem of the self — a problem of the kinds of people that failing machines created, or threatened, or presupposed.
Visual artist, software engineer and maker (she calls herself an engineering artist) Helena Sarin has always worked with cutting-edge technologies. Art making ran as a parallel track, and all her art was analog, until she discovered GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks). Since then generative models became her primary medium – creating at the intersection of technology and art elevated her artistic voice. Helena is a frequent speaker at ML/AI conferences, in the last few years delivering invited talks at MIT, Library of Congress, Capital One, Adobe Research, CMU, TEDx Konstanz. Her artwork was widely exhibited, and was featured in a number of publications. She published four artist books, and her recent forays are into animations and generative pottery.
Following the panel, light refreshments will be provided and there will be opportunities to talk informally with the program participants.
Co-sponsored by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, Princeton Public Library, and the National Humanities Center.
Attendees are strongly encouraged but not required to register in advance.
Featured image created with OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 text-to-image model.
