Culture x AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology

Generative AI is increasingly recognised as a social and cultural technology. These systems process an enormous amount of social data to produce novel cultural artefacts, such as text, images, and videos. While much progress has been made in evaluating cultural aspects of AI, it has tended to focus on harm mitigation: identifying and preventing moral violations, the spread of bias and misinformation, and deviation from human values. But a more positive or constructive notion of culture in AI remains underdeveloped. How can we evaluate cultural aspects of AI technology in a way that not only seeks to avoid failure, but gives a more robust definition of success?

This workshop covers current approaches for evaluating cultural aspects of generative AI. Our primary focus is on work that aims to bring ideas and techniques from the humanities, arts, and qualitative social sciences upstream in AI development. We'll bring together a range of work at the intersection of culture and AI, with the goal of not just studying the effects of AI after deployment but also in actively shaping the design of the technology itself. The workshop will give special focus to research that seeks to articulate a positive vision for cultural AI.