‘Who’s Afraid of AI?’: U of T event asks what kind of AI future we want

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence has so far been met with a mix of optimism and fear – but relatively little insight into what this potentially smarter-than-us technology actually means for our lives.

It's a problem the University of Toronto's David Rokeby hopes to address – and he’s looking to arts and the humanities for help.

“We found that there’s very little rich discussion in the middle ground between ‘AI is going to kill us all’ and ‘AI is going to solve everything,’” says Rokeby, an assistant professor, teaching stream at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“I think most people are in the middle going, ‘I’ve got complicated feelings,’ and they aren’t being addressed by in the media, by corporations or in academia. There are some people who are doing that, but the loudest voices in the room are at the two extremes.

“We’re really trying to open that middle question.”

Rokeby, the director of U of T’s BMO Lab for Creative Research in the Arts, Performance, Emerging Technologies and AI, is helping organize the two-day conference and week-long arts festival to explore the topic from a human perspective. Who’s Afraid of AI? – co-presented by University College and the BMO Lab in U of T’s Faculty of Arts & Science on Oct. 23 and 24 – bridges computer science, the humanities, and the arts, bringing a diverse set of voices into the conversation about how artificial intelligence is shaping society.

The event features a keynote by “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, a U of T University Professor emeritus of computer science and 2024 Nobel Prize winner, who has warned about the existential dangers posed by the technology’s rapid development. He will be joined by computer vision expert Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and co-director of the school’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, who is sometimes dubbed AI’s “godmother.”

Yet, the conference is far from another tech talk.

It also features prominent voices from the humanities and creative fields: author Jeanette Winterson; literary critic N. Katherine Hayles; and playwright and director Roland Schimmelpfennig, whose new play about AI will have a staged reading during the event.

Other participants include Suzanne Kite, one of the first Indigenous artists to work with AI; Matteo Pasquinelli, author of The Eye of the Master; Leif Weatherby, author of Language Machines; and curator Antonio Somaini, who recently organized a major exhibition on AI art at Jeu de Paume in Paris.

The accompanying week-long arts festival, which will take place at U of T and across the city, includes AI-themed art shows and exhibitions, film screenings, music and theatre. It kicks off on Oct. 19.

For Rokeby, including artists in the conversation is essential – he sees them as early interpreters of technological change.

“If we go back to another very famous University of Toronto professor, Marshall McLuhan – [he] talked about artists being the antenna of their race as an early warning system,” he says, adding that he hopes the conference provokes deep, inclusive dialogue about the kind of AI future we want.

“Artists are part of the vanguard and a really important part of our negotiation of our relationship with new technologies.”

The idea for the conference originated with Pia Kleber, a U of T professor emerita of comparative literature, and has been two years in the making. The organizing committee also includes Dirk Bernhardt-Walther, a professor in the department of psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science, and Rayyan Dabbous, a PhD candidate at U of T’s Centre for Comparative Literature.

Although the team has no plans to make it an annual event, Rokeby hopes the conversation will continue well beyond U of T.

“AI is touching on every field,” he says.

“The conversation about how we understand it, what it is good at and what it is bad at it, I think it’s very important and we can only get that from a broad-spectrum discussion about it.

“So, we’re trying to kick off this larger societal conversation amongst thought leaders, academics, artists, and humanities scholars."