There is an inherent contradiction in the name of one of the world’s largest AI companies: OpenAI. OpenAI is neither “open” in its business practices nor in the way it uses open access data to train its models. But it is no secret that closed models are built upon open knowledge.

This panel explores the critical and evolving relationship between open access and open knowledge as it pertains to AI/LLMs. The panel will discuss the many possible costs – financially, communally, scholarly – of outsourcing open knowledge for profit. For example, are open knowledge communities, such as the Wikimedia community, being forced to rethink their contributions or the terms of their work? How can the open knowledge community and critical practitioners, from faculty to students, challenge what the author James Bridle calls in New Dark Age the danger of “automation bias” in the use of LLMs?

Panelists:

Matthew Gold is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where he is Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, and where he directs the MA Program in Digital Humanities and the MS Program in Data Analysis and Visualization. With Lauren F. Klein, he co-edits the Debates in the Digital Humanities series at the University of Minnesota Press, and has recently co-edited Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 and Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. His collaborative digital humanities projects, including Manifold, the CUNY Academic Commons, and The Commons In A Box have been supported by grants from a the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and other funding institutions. He is Past President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the US-based scholarly society for the digital humanities, and the Association for Digital Humanities Organizations, the international association of DH organizations.

Andrew Lih s a digital media strategist, author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia and a noted expert in online collaboration, digital news innovation and linked open data. He was the recipient of the U.S. National Archives Citizen Archivist of the Year award and a Knight Foundation grant for his work with Wikipedia and cultural institutions. He was the inaugural Wiki Education Foundation research fellow in 2015. He has been associate professor journalism at the University of Southern California, American University and Hong Kong University, and started the new media program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1995. His multimedia reporting of China and the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics has appeared in the Wall Street Journal newspaper and website.

Filipa Calado uses digital tools to study language. She experiments with methods like text analysis and machine learning to think critically about the ways that technology transforms linguistic expressions of sex, gender, and sexuality into computable data. Most recently, she is using Large Language Models to study discourses of transphobia in the US. Her coding projects and teaching materials are published on her github profile, under gofilipa. 

The panel is moderated by Benjamin Zweig, Project Manager for Digital Projects at Columbia University Libraries. Benjamin is also a Visting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and served as an Adjunct Professor at Baruch College and SUNY Westchester Community College.

This event is organized by Columbia University Libraries, including Barnard Library and the Gottesman Libraries, as part of Open Access Week 2024.

Register HERE.

Where: Online

Poster Image: Courtesy of Canva.

Information on Open Access Week may also be found here.