Distinguished Visiting Professorship 2024
Dr. Simone Natale, Universität Turin
Dr. Simone Natale ist im Juli 2024 als Distinguished Visiting Professor zu Gast am Institut für Medienwissenschaft.
Biografie
Simone Natale ist Associate Professor für Medientheorie und -geschichte an der Universität Turin, Italien, und Editor des Journals Zeitschrift Media, Culture & Society. Er ist Autor von zwei Monographien, zuletzt Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test (Oxford University Press, 2021, übersetzt ins Chinesische, Italienische und Portugiesische), sowie mehr als 40 begutachteten Artikeln in internationalen Zeitschriften wie New Media & Society, dem Journal of Communication, Communication Theory und Convergence. Er hat an der Columbia University, USA, der Concordia University in Montreal, Kanada, der Humboldt-Universität und der Universität zu Köln in Deutschland sowie der Loughborough University in Großbritannien gelehrt und geforscht. Seine Forschung wurde von internationalen Institutionen finanziert, darunter die AHRC und die ESRC in Großbritannien, die Humboldt-Stiftung in Deutschland, das MIUR in Italien und die Italian Academy der Columbia University in den USA.
Öffentlicher Vortrag
Projecting Life onto Machines
Public discussions about AI often stress the idea that technologies such as generative AI might lead to the emergence of machines that think and even feel like humans. Drawing on histories of how people project lives onto talking things, from spiritualist seances in the Victorian era to contemporary advances in robotics, this talk argues that the “lives” of AI have more to do with how humans perceive and relate to machines exhibiting communicative behavior, than with the functioning of computing technologies in itself. Taking up this point of view helps acknowledge and further interrogate how perceptions and cultural representations inform the outcome of technologies that are programmed to interact and communicate with human users.
Lehrangebot
AI and Communication
The course interrogates the social, cultural, and ethical implications of AI technologies programmed to enter into communication with users. Students will be stimulated to explore how theoretical and methodological tools developed within communication and media studies, which have traditionally been employed to study mediated communication between humans, can be applied to better understand emerging forms of communication between humans and machines. Concrete examples of communicative AI, i.e. AI technologies that enter in communication with users, will be taken into account and experimented with. As part of the requirement for the course, students will be asked to critically analyze a specific tool or software, e.g. ChatGPT and other Large Language Models, voice assistants, and companion chatbots.