NEH Creates New Funding for Ethics & AI Research
The Biden administration yesterday called for legislation about and regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), the development and implementation of which will involve expertise in the the ethics of AI.
Just afterwards, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) launched a new program funding research on that subject.
The White House Executive Order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence” lays out new standards for AI safety and security, asks Congress for new legislation to protect people’s privacy in light of AI-related threats to it, and calls for regulations for the ethical and responsible use of AI, among other things.
The new program from the NEH, Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, “will support research projects that seek to understand and address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of artificial intelligence.”
The NEH’s program provides the following funding opportunities:
- Humanities Research Centers on Artificial Intelligence. This funding opportunity offers up to $750,000 to support the creation of humanities research centers focusing on the ethical, legal, or societal implications of artificial intelligence.
- Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities. Independent scholars or those affiliated with an institution may apply to Fellowships, Awards for Faculty at HBCUs, HSIs, and TCUs, Summer Stipends, or Public Scholars.
- Collaborative Research funding for teams interested in planning for an international AI research project or hosting a scholarly convening about AI.
- Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities for institutions interested in hosting professional development programs on the latest research related to humanistic AI.
You can learn more about the NEH’s program here.
Just when you thought not enough of philosophy was working on this.
Pretty cynical (and short-sighted) remark, given that the advent of AI arguably counts as an all-hands-on-deck moment. In any event your worry is misplaced, since what such funding adds is new people listening, not necessarily new philosophers working.
How open is the NEH to collaborations or centers for empirical research involving humans or even AI models?
In other words, how broadly construed is the H in “NEH”? In the past, I got the sense human and machine experiments were out of scope, but computational corpus linguistics (e.g., quantitative text analysis) could be writhing scope.