05/07/2024 7:30 PM

Speaker: Nuhu Osman Attah
Title: The Work of Art in the Age of Automated Production
Description:
The title of this talk is an allusion to a philosophical essay from the last century observing the rise of technology like the camera and other means of “mechanical reproduction”. The author realized a sea change was in the offing for art and all our notions of creativity, the beautiful, and the meaningful. Today, we find ourselves in the same boat — the technology, AI, is vastly different, and the ideas are also very different, but the effects are equally revolutionary and equally worth our philosophical attention.

Speaker bio: I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh where I am currently completing a dissertation on the philosophical and cognitive scientific issues raised by large language models (like ChatGPT). My primary area of research is in the foundations of cognitive science, philosophical issues in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and philosophy of mind. In addition to foundational conceptual issues touching on AI systems, I am also interested in their ethical, scientific, and existential ramifications.