The End of the Human World or the Beginning of the New Digital Humanism? Artificial Intelligence and New Developments in Social Sciences, Humanities and Higher Education

The conference was initiated by social sciences researchers and educators who concerned with the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and its influence on their professional fields and the processes of knowledge production. The conference is conducted in the context of the appearance and unprecedented distribution of GAI (Generative Artificial Intelligence) attracted much attention of specialists presenting different academic and public domains. The development of such applications as ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer) capable of generating responses to various questions representing different forms of knowledge, or Midjourney creating drawings and images, “is both impressive and concerning” (Hwang, Chen 2023: I). In Autumn 2022 generative artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT was launched and in 2023 it “already turns the tables in society” (van Laarhoven 2023: 111). Various AI instruments enabling users to create presentations, testes, scientific articles, theses, juridical documents etc. have mushroomed over the last year.

GAI emergence presented momentous change for different social fields and everyday life; social sciences, humanities and education among them. Educational process, for example, has been modified dramatically: on one hand, students point out at AI’s great potential for personalized learning support, writing and brainstorming assistance (Chan, Hu 2023); on the other, integrity of higher education is under greater threat than it was before in terms of accuracy and reliability of information as well as exacerbation of plagiarism problem (Dwivedi et al 2023). There is a lack of clear academic policies regarding the use of AI and low probability of detection of AI content (Michel-Villarreal et al 2023). Legal systems are also unable to respond quickly to the situation; ChatGPT works faster and offers Law ChatGPT which can create not only various types of juridical documents but also “legal research and more” (https://lawchatgpt.com/). Some changes can be discovered in editorial policy of scientific journals. Elsevier, for example, introduced new ethical demands to authors, reviewers and editors of its journals aimed to the exclusion of a direct use of generative AI in such parts of a research process as interpretation and conclusion (Hwang, Chen 2023: I). Recently, the European Parliament issued the Artificial intelligence act, “the world’s first comprehensive AI law” (EU AI Act 2023). This document establishes different rules for different risk levels for providers and users of AI. All these tendencies make important a serious discussion of the key issues of the influence of GAI on contemporary process of knowledge production in social sciences and humanities and the field of higher education.

This conference primarily focuses on representatives of Social Sciences and Humanities who engage in the process of studying generative AI as itself and its influence on their professional fields and social relationships. The main question is how GAI has changed and continue to change the fields of social sciences, humanities and education. Equally important is the question of what response the proliferation of GAI tools has generated in these fields. Organizers hope that the conference will be an excellent opportunity for such a discussion which can help to compare the situations in various fields and countries, to develop general understanding of current processes and to evaluate these processes from different points of view.