Tom Davidson - "Harnessing Generative Artificial Intelligence for Sociological Research"

Thursday 14 March 2024, noon - 1pm Tom Davidson, Rutgers University “Start Generating: Harnessing Generative Artificial Intelligence for Sociological Research” How can generative artificial intelligence (GAI) be used for sociological research? This talk explores applications to the study of text and images across multiple domains, including computational, qualitative, and experimental research. Drawing upon recent research and stylized experiments with DALL-E and GPT-4, discuss the potential applications of text-to-text, image-to-text, and text-to-image models for sociological research. Across these areas, GAI can make advanced computational methods more efficient, flexible, and accessible. The paper also emphasizes several challenges raised by these technologies, including interpretability, transparency, reliability, reproducibility, ethics, and privacy, as well as the implications of bias and bias mitigation efforts and the trade-offs between proprietary models and open-source alternatives. When used with care, these technologies can help advance many different areas of sociological methodology, complementing and enhancing our existing toolkits. See: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/u9nft. Thomas Davidson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University—New Brunswick. He specializes in using computational methods and data from social media to analyze far-right activism, populism, and hate speech. He is currently researching the relationship between ranking and recommendation algorithms and activism, the applications of generative AI to sociological research, and the social context of content moderation. His work has been published in venues including Social Forces, Mobilization, and Socius.