[Commlist] SUNY Council on Writing Conference on Rhetoric, Writing, and AI

Please join the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook 
University and the SUNY Council on Writing in a virtual conference Oct 
13-14 entitled "Writing, Thinking, and Learning with AI: Exploring 
Relationships of Rhetoric and Artificial Intelligence."

The conference convenes on zoom Friday evening, October 13, and runs 
throughout the day on Saturday the 14th. Almost forty panels and 
workshops are scheduled in five time slots across the day on Saturday. 
Well over 100 presenters include teachers and scholars not only from 
within SUNY, but from across the country and world! We are especially 
pleased to be joined by our two keynote speakers: on Friday night, 
Meredith Broussard of New York University; on Saturday morning, Annette 
Vee of University of Pittsburgh. Their abstracts are included below.

Register now if you plan to attend -- registration closes Tuesday, 
October 10, at 5 pm ET: https://bit.ly/SUNYCoWPWR 
<https://bit.ly/SUNYCoWPWR>. Registration is $40 for tenure-track 
faculty and professionals; $25 for non-tenure track, full-time permanent 
faculty and professionals; and Free for graduate and undergraduate 
students and part-time faculty and professionals.

6pm Fri Oct 13
*"Confronting Race, Gender, & Ability Bias in Tech" *
Meredith Broussard, NYU
What if racism, sexism, and ableism aren't just glitches in mostly 
functional machinery—what if they're coded into our technological 
systems? In this talk, data scientist and journalist Meredith Broussard 
explores why neutrality in tech is a myth and how algorithms can be held 
accountable. Broussard, one of the few Black female researchers in 
artificial intelligence, explores a range of examples: from facial 
recognition technology trained only to recognize lighter skin tones, to 
mortgage-approval algorithms that encourage discriminatory lending, to 
the dangerous feedback loops that arise when medical diagnostic 
algorithms are trained on insufficiently diverse data. Even when such 
technologies are designed with good intentions, Broussard shows, 
fallible humans develop programs that can result in devastating 
consequences. Broussard argues that the solution isn't to make 
omnipresent tech more inclusive, but to root out the algorithms that 
target certain demographics as “other” to begin with. She explores 
practical strategies to detect when technology reinforces inequality, 
and offers ideas for redesigning our systems to create a more equitable 
world.

9am Sat Oct 14
*"Can AI writing be good?"*
Annette Vee, University of Pittsburgh
One of the central challenges of AI's encroachment on our creative and 
communicative practices is its alignment with human values. AI systems 
such as Large Language Models (LLMs) are being used for decisionmaking, 
communication, and creativity--which often call for tradeoffs among 
conflicting values--yet, unlike humans, AI systems have no stake in what 
they do. How, then, do we align the outputs of AI systems with outputs 
that humans value? In terms of LLMs, how can we make AI writing good? In 
this talk, I point to some of the challenges to ethical alignment of AI 
and suggest how we might use our classroom practices to render AI 
writing good on the local level. Writing has always been imbricated with 
ethics and deliberations of the good, from Quintillian's concept of the 
orator as a "good [person] speaking well" to John Duffy's insistence 
that "writing involves ethical choices." AI writing systems force us to 
reconsider what good writing is and what responsibilities we have as 
writers and as teachers. Writing has always meant collaborating with 
technologies and its future will inevitably include AI. As writing 
teachers, we can explore with students the ethical engagements of 
writing, the responsibilities we have to others when we write, and ways 
to align AI writing to our ethics and values.


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