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- Convenors:
-
Seweryn Rudnicki
(AGH University of Krakow)
Katarzyna Cieślak
Jan Waligórski (AGH University of Krakow)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
The proliferation of generative AI in making knowledge about social realities is already underway and calls for sustained attention from STS scholars. This panel aims to discuss how AI-based technologies become adopted, appropriated, and accommodated in social research practices.
Description
The ways of representing and imaging ‘the social’ have long been a subject of inquiry within STS (Collins 1994; Osborne, Rose 1999; Latour 2000; Law 2009; Camic et al 2011; Afeltowicz, Pietrowicz 2013; Marres et al., 2018). Currently, the social research practices - both within academia and beyond - are experiencing significant transformations related to the widespread adoption of GenAI-based technologies. It has been claimed that: ‘advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), are dramatically affecting social science research’ (Grossman et al. 2023), and that ‘these tools may advance the scale, scope, and speed of social science research—and (...) enable new forms of scientific inquiry’ (Bail 2024: 121), or even ‘supplant human participants for data collection’ (Antosz et al. 2022). At the same time, critics have been pointing out dangers related to these developments, such as inherent ‘hallucinations’, the reproduction of bias, and the problematic belief that AI’s ‘explainability’ can be achieved through purely technical means (Argyle et al. 2023; Bassett, Roberts 2023; Hofmann et al. 2024). Regardless of bold claims and sceptical voices, the proliferation of generative AI in making knowledge about social realities is already underway—and it deserves ongoing and close attention from STS scholars. Hence, this panel invites contributions that address questions including (but not limited to): 1) What kinds of representations and imaginaries of ‘the social’ are produced using AI tools; 2) How AI-based technologies become adopted, appropriated, and accommodated in social research practices (both in academic and applied contexts); 3) What kinds of realities emerge, become strengthened, or are hindered through the use of AI in social research?