Our weekly seminar series welcomes Avery Slater, faculty affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute. Slater is an assistant professor of 20th century American literature at the University of Toronto. Her research investigates the re-conceptualization of human and nonhuman forms of language following the rise of information and computational technologies, with specific attention to the history of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Talk title
“Latent traits: AI and the new psychometrics”
Abstract
In recent years, a new wave of social science research has emerged, combining AI/ML technologies like facial recognition with widely available user data hosted on social media platforms. Such research uses AI for data-driven diagnosis and prediction of “latent traits” in individuals and populations—traits that are not directly observable and that would normally require a subject’s self-reporting. These latent traits include beliefs, preferences, personality, and sexual orientation.
In this talk, I will focus especially on examples of AI having been used to predict human sexuality from faces (i.e., to produce an AI version of “gaydar.”) This talk will also trace connections between psychometrics—the scientific measurement of intelligence and other mental qualities—with so-called “sciences of stereotyping.” As research techniques in the computational social sciences promote newly automated forms of diagnostics at “zero-acquaintance,” this talk will examine the political and ethical problems of such technologies of human-subject recognition.
About Avery Slater
Avery Slater received her PhD in English literature from the Department of English at Cornell University. Slater’s teaching focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century literature in a global context. Her research investigates the re-conceptualization of human and nonhuman forms of language following the rise of information and computational technologies, with specific attention to the history of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Her book project Apparatus Poetics explores how mid-twentieth-century poets revise and reinvent modernist theories of poetic process in response to emerging technologies of language (computation, artificial intelligence, machine translation, information theory). She spent the academic year of 2016-2017 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Humanities Forum, researching the literary and philosophical contexts of postwar machine translation. She has also held fellowships from the Society for the Humanities (Cornell) and the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has appeared in New Literary History, Symplokē, Cultural Critique, American Literature, Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture, and Technology, Amodern, and in edited collections Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke UP), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (Oxford UP), Trauma and Literature in an Age of Globalization (Routledge), and The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Avery Slater is serving a five-year term on Executive Committee of the MLA’s TC Forum for the Digital Humanities. She is a member of the editorial board for the Brill series “Studies in the Lyric.”
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by 45 minutes of discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link approximately one hour before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.
Avery Slater