Design Justice Labs: An International and Interdisciplinary Digital Network for Community-Centered Research on the “Generative AI” Modeling of Human Languages, Communication, Arts, and Cultures

FAIN: RZ-292740-23

Rutgers University (Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045)
Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Project Director: November 2022 to present)

A digital repository of findings and research templates based on humanistic research on the simulation of human language, communication, art, and culture by AI software. (36 months)

The Design Justice Labs are conceived as a networked scholarly digital project that connects researchers and students with community partners in the US, Australia, and South Africa to develop and share research on the “AI” modeling of human languages, communication, arts, and cultures (“generative AI”). Inspired by design justice principles as elaborated by Costanza-Chock (2020), our labs center groups that are marginalized by design processes. Rutgers will focus on large language models (LLMs) through “probing” experiments that assess bias and errors; explore the tendency for homogeneity and normalization in AI-generated storytelling; and propose new humanities-inflected benchmarks for machine “understanding.” Australian National University (ANU) will work with large image models (LIMs) to explore their visual logics, and the modes of creativity and politics they enable or foreclose in the context of decolonial and contemporary arts and media practices. University of Pretoria (UP) will extend the capacity of research with, and data creation for, local African languages, while exploring the socio-cultural impacts of LLMs that marginalize these languages. (Edited by staff)