Colorado College Receives $1.5M Grant to Explore Language and Artificial Intelligence

Colorado College has received a $1.5 million Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times grant to launch a three-year curricular initiative named Generative Futures: Critical Language Inquiry in the Age of Artificial Intelligence that aims to examine the shifting role of language in shaping knowledge, identity and the ways in which we understand the world in an era where the influence of AI is increasingly pervasive.

“This grant allows us to engage what is perhaps the central question facing educators—facing all of us—today,” said Ryan Banagale, Director of the Crown Center for Teaching and Assistant Dean of the Faculty, who is the faculty lead on this interdisciplinary team project. “Language and technology are intertwined irrevocably in today’s world. Our goal is to help students slow down and ask how meaning takes shape in such a deeply mediated world.”

Grounded in the liberal arts principle that meaning emerges through particular acts of interpretation, the goal of the Generative Futures grant is to examine how language systems—spoken, written, visual, computational, and symbolic—shape how people think, create, communicate and create.

“The Humanities have always been a crucial engine of critical inquiry,” said Steve Hayward, Professor of English, “and they are going to be more essential than ever in the age of AI.”

Two separate but interconnected frameworks shape this work. The first is Critical Language Inquiry which explores and interrogates the many ways in which language reflects and reinforces systems of inclusion and exclusion and the impact the advent of AI is having on them across historical and cultural contexts.

“A focus on language is something we all share at the college,” says Ane Steckenbiller, Associate Professor, and Chair of Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, & Russian Studies. “It underlies everything we do, whether that is the learning of languages in the plural or thinking about music or film or any…

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