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Writing Nonfiction in the Company of Artificial Intelligences

Event Language

English

June 2 June 6

Format

in person/face-à-face

Led by: William J. Turkel

This course is a hands-on introduction to using LLM technology (large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini) to assist with the practice of writing nonfiction. Popular discussions of this technology have focused on the unconstrained models’ tendencies to hallucinate, their inability to cite or return verifiable sources of information, and their potential misuse for misinformation and disinformation. When you are working with these models at a more technical level, however, you learn that their capabilities are changing every few weeks. As current problems are solved new opportunities and challenges arise. This course teaches ways to constrain and even make use of hallucination, to draw information and make inferences from verifiable structured data, and to rigorously cite sources. The workflows that you will learn are firmly grounded in the tools and techniques of the digital humanities: text encoding, the semantic web, linked open data, bibliography, databases, web APIs, text analysis, and text mining. There are two key differences, however. Rather than working with off-the-shelf tools or building them from the ground up, generative AI allows us to work from the top down. We also make extensive use of the models’ ability to co-author code as well as prose.

This course will require a minimal additional fee for software.

3150 Rue Jean Brillant
Montreal, Québec H3T 1N7 Canada
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