LLMs & Generative AI

Introduction to Digital Humanities

Alice McGrath

2025-04-08

Outline

Syllabus updates
Discussion of LLMs and AI readings
Generative AI with Microsoft Copilot workshop

Assignments

For Thursday:
- Read/skim: Stark, Luke, “Animation and AI” (moodle link)
- Prepare 3 questions to ask our guest speaker
Go over Visual Essay assignment instructions

Discussion of readings

What is generative AI?
How have you used it? Why or why not?
Did the readings highlight anything you didn’t know about it? If so, what?

Discussion, continued

Madhumita Murgia and the Financial Times Visual Storytelling Team “Generative AI exists because of the transformer” Financial Times, Sept. 12, 2023.
Bender, Emily M., et al. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜.” https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.
Lauren Goodlad, “Editor’s Introduction: Humanities in the Loop”, Critical AI 2023.

Moodle responses: week 11

Activity

What do you want AI to do for you?
In pairs: brainstorm 2-3 different prompts and write them down in a document.
Consider these categories: technical help, task help, fun/experimentation

Prompt engineering

Navigate to Microsoft Copilot.
- Select ‘work’ and log in with your BMC credentials
With your partner, test out the prompts you came up with
- Be specific and detailed
- Refine your prompt with follow-up questions
- Test any code outputs to see if it works
Save the output in the same document

Discussion

Share your prompts and results with the class.

How did Copilot do?
What did you learn from the process?

Reflections

On your own: reflect on the key takeaways from our discussions today and on your own experience of working with Copilot. Post your thoughts on the Moodle discussion thread for today’s class.