Revisiting Writing
Chatbots to AI-Generated Text, a New Dilemma for Writers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Oakley Bentley
The evolution of chatbots over the last three decades has led to them now simulating natural human interactions, which means that automation has caught up with writers. These technologies have reached a point where they can create new written content and give the illusion of understanding. As a result, the latest iterations of these technologies now require us to update long-established education pedagogies and navigate necessary pivots within careers rooted in written and visual communications. This paper analyzes both the positive and negative implications of our increasing reliance on chatbots and their AI-generated text. It explores the trade-offs and gauge the general public’s trust of these interactions while examining the unintended and secondary industry impacts and challenges, including those affecting business, software development, and customer support.
Crisis Terms and Metaphors in Media Reports View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shelley Ching-yu Depner
Pandemics, wars, and climate change are all threats and crises. This paper focuses on the pandemic crisis terms and metaphors in the newspaper corpus Taiwan News Smart Web. We apply the analytic framework Metaphor Identification in Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2018) and Propaganda techniques (Da San Martino et al. 2019) and ask the following research questions: (1). How are the crisis terms and metaphors used in the Mandarin Chinese news reports in Taiwan? (2). Are there any metaphorical patterns generated? The results of the study indicate that Mandarin crisis terms can be categorized into medical, politic, economic, academic, and network fields. They are used from daily life, community to school. The source domains of the metaphors that mapped onto the target domain {crisis} are {geography}, {transportation}, and {emotion}. Such emotional expressions are for instance si-cheng 死城 ‘dead city’ and baofuxing-luyou 報復性旅遊 ‘retaliated tourism’. The linguistic patterns varied and phonological application is popular. For example, homophones jialing 加零 ‘add zero (infection)’ to jialing 嘉玲 ‘personal name’ and jialing佳玲 ‘personal name’, the language is used to expand the semantic meaning without abandoning the original meaning. Bringing in new semantic purpose vividly and interestingly. In addition to the metaphor of anthropomorphism and linguistic characteristics in Mandarin, the crisis metaphors also cross into different semantic domains at the same time. The epidemic rise and fall, business occasions, and personal names are all used based on the clever employment of language.
Ethics is Experience: Inside the Civilization of Automation and Simulation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Piero Dominici
Does it make sense to speak about the ethics of AI, when it is humans who set the ethical grounds for our artificially “intelligent” machines? Before pondering this, we should underline that in complex human and social systems, a slight variation in one of the smallest parts can have an enormous effect on the entire system. Thus, changes occur from the bottom up in complex (living) systems, unlike man-made systems, whose evolution can be controlled and predicted. Similarly, it is from society’s grassroots that ethics arises, while top-down governance plays a minor role. This cultural question cannot be limited to a purely normative-legal framework but must be supported by social actors who share the conviction that freedom and responsibility are related concepts. A full awareness of the rights and duties of citizenship, acquired through educational processes which stimulate critical, systemic thinking, is essential to any social system. It is of paramount importance to realize that these ethics and morals cannot be imposed but must develop through real-life experiences. In this hypertechnological age, human potential for transforming reality is practically unlimited, hence the deontological ethics of intention – founded on “indisputable” principles -- are no longer adequate. We find ourselves in need of an ethics based not on utilitarianist concepts, but of a consequentialist ethics, founded on a rigorous, responsible evaluation of the consequences of our actions. This is even more crucial with respect to AI, considering that, despite all our studies on the matter, we still know so little about it.
