Humanistic AI: Towards a new field of interdisciplinary expertise and research

Abstract

The Gothenburg Research Infrastructure in Digital Humanities (GRIDH) have participated in projects within various humanities fields that utilise as well as develop research tools and infrastructural resources that incorporate applications of ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI). These applications can include natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, large language models, image recognition algorithms, classification, clustering, and deep learning. This paper advances the term ‘humanistic AI’ to describe an emergent form of interdisciplinary practice that uses and develops AI-based research applications to answer humanities research questions together with its entangled humanistic reflection. We coin this term to make implicit and visible the epistemological and material particularities of its practice and the new forms of knowledge its affordances make possible. The paper presents GRIDH projects within ‘humanistic AI’ together with its developed AI resources and applications.