The humanities will soon undergo a second digital revolution. While the last five years have seen language models—the core component to many generative AI models—take the sciences by storm, the humanities has remained relatively unaffected. Generative AI is on the doorstep: literate chatbots, artistic photo generators, and more; are all primed to change the way we teach, conduct research, and collect knowledge. Sil Hamilton will go through how language models work, their history, and how they can contribute meaningfully to the humanities.

Sil is AI researcher-in-residence at Hacks/Hackers, a network of journalists who rethink the future of news through talks, hackathons, and conferences. A machine learning researcher at McGill University exploring the intersection of AI and culture, Sil has published research at NLP conferences like ACL, AAAI, and COLING. His work exploring the limits of language models has been discussed by Wired, The Financial Times, and Le Devoir. Sil has given talks on AI and the newsroom at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard; the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia; the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California; and The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin. Sil has consulted for The Associated Press on AI policies and serves as technology advisor at Health Tech Without Borders, a non-profit seeking to mitigate healthcare crises with digital tools.

This special event is hosted by the UNLV Libraries, Black Mountain Institute, and Plympton, with additional funding provided by Nevada Humanities.

An audience Q&A with Sil will follow the presentation. A reception will conclude the event. This talk is free and open to all.