Generative AI tools stake claims to anonymized, collective authorship through machine-generated texts that are similar to patterns in the datasets they trained on. The notion of authorship faces new challenges of delineating the agency, knowability, and intentionality of written words. Led by Alexa Alice Joubin (English and Digital Humanities Institute) and Kylie Quave (University Writing Program and Anthropology), this session explores our society’s evolving relationship to written words and the future of the craft of writing.

AI and Religion

There are cases of AI monks and priests. Though religious institutions have not always behaved ethically in the past, they have centuries of experience parsing moral conundrums through the lens of their own belief systems. Prof. Irene Oh from the GW Department of Religion will lead a discussion of the many ways that artificial intelligence is changing the meaning and practice of religion.

What is missing from the current debate are insights from performance studies. Since ChatGPT remixes statistically most likely combinations of words, its outputs are in fact a form of theatrical performance. It draws on users’ prompts and the publics’ collective memories to produce improvised performances, within specific parameters, for its user-audiences.

Alexa Alice Joubin views it as her responsibility to teach students how to use ChatGPT responsibly, not as a shortcut. “In our inquiry-driven culture, we need to know how to retrieve information through queries,” Joubin said. “Further, democratic society needs good question-askers as much as good problem-solvers. Asking key questions helps to advance scholarly fields, and students develop editorial, curatorial and critical questioning skills that are employable skills and the foundation of civil society in an era of ChatGPT.”

Faculty Perspectives: Creating Open Education Resources Wednesday April 12, 2023, 1 pm eastern time   Zoom link at: https://open.wrlc.org/events/wed-04122023-1300      Alexa Alice Joubin, …

GW Digital Humanities Institute founding co-director Alexa Alice Joubin was named the inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award on April 7, …

Generative Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) tools have the potential to alter profoundly the ways we work, create, think, and behave. They raise such questions as: What makes humans distinctive? Can machines have consciousness? What is intelligence? Are the methods used to create A.I. tools ethical? In this symposium, we hope to open a discussion on the philosophical, ethical, political, and cultural, challenges that A.I. poses for our society.

GW Digital Humanities Institute founding co-director Alexa Alice Joubin recently spoke at a roundtable on artificial intelligence and higher education.  Prof. Alexa …

Co-Director Receives Two Awards

GW Digital Humanities Institute founding co-director Alexa Alice Joubin received the Trachtenberg award for research as well as a Writing in the Discipline teaching award in 2022.

Digital Tools for Openness

Alexa Alice Joubin will be speaking at the 2022 George Washington University Teaching Day to address openly-licensed digital tools that foster inclusiveness …

In this workshop we will get started creating a custom online space for communicating to and inspiring your students. You will follow a simple approach reflecting on the student’s perspective and pulling together a story to tell using Adobe Creative Cloud Express.

Screening Shakespeare

We are pleased to announce the publication of Alexa Alice Joubin‘s online textbook Screening Shakespeare, just in time for the new academic year! The openly-licensed learning modules in the book cover key concepts of film studies, such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound and music, and film theory.