Prof. Emmanuele Chersoni Invited to Speak at NTU Linguistics

Time: March 3, 2025, 13:30-15:00
Venue: Room 336, 3F, Humanities Building
Speaker: Prof. Emmanuele Chersoni, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Topic: Large Language Models in Humanities and Arts

This invited talk examined the role of large language models in humanities and arts research, including questions of machine creativity, disciplinary application, and the future of human-AI collaboration. The original Mandarin announcement and abstract are preserved below.

時間：3/3（一），13:30-15:00
地點：人文館3樓336教室
講者：Prof. Emmanuele Chersoni, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
主題：Large Language Models in Humanities and Arts

摘要：Since the introduction of the ChatGPT conversational chatbot in November 2022, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been at the forefront of the current AI revolution. Their strong performance on NLP benchmarks, together with their striking naturalness in conversation, contributed to stimulate a new debate in public discourse and media about the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It has been shown that LLMs can display new abilities and generalizations that were not predictable simply on the basis of parameter scaling-up (i.e. emergent abilities), which also prompted the question on whether such systems can generate novel concepts and ideas beyond what they have seen during their training – or, in other words, whether they can be creative. Although machines may not be creative in the same way as humans are, the fact that AI-generated texts and images are becoming more and more undistinguishable from human creations raised a lot of debate and the understandable fear that, consequently to the application of the new technology in fields such as journalism, literature and visual arts, many jobs are going to disappear. In my talk, I will try to address some of the following questions: What are the applications of LLMs to the humanities, and what is next for our disciplines? What do we mean when we talk about “machine creativity”? Are human creatives going to be replaced, or is a human-AI cooperation the most likely future?