Dartmouth College has a new class called Critical AI that looks at the history and sociocultural impacts of the technologies known as artificial intelligence. Dartmouth News story is here.
The Department of English and Creative Writing class is being taught this fall by James “Jed” Dobson, an associate professor of English and creative writing and director of the Writing Program who has been appointed special advisor to the provost for artificial intelligence for 2024-25.
“The class looks at artificial intelligence from a humanities perspective, applying cultural critique to assess its impact, while understanding how these technologies came to be, how they work, and how they fail,” says Dobson, the author of several books and essays on computational methods including machine learning, computer vision, and data mining.
Students are quite interested in questions about policy and law related to AI, says Dobson. He was surprised by the widespread interest in the class. “I’ve got the greatest diversity of majors than most classes I’ve taught, which is great and exciting,” he says.
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