Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been an explosion of interest in generative artificial intelligence. Among social scientists, there is increasing recognition that these technologies open up new methodological opportunities. Large language models not only make advanced computational text analysis more accessible and flexible, enabling more scholars to use techniques like supervised text classification, but they also enable new forms of prompt-based text analysis.
The latest generation of generative AI models are also multimodal, making them useful for analyzing images, audio, and other media. Moreover, these models can reproduce patterns and associations present in the vast troves of text and images they are trained on. By experimenting with generative AI, we can potentially gain insights into culture, cognition, and other domains. Yet, at the same time, these emerging technologies pose challenges for social science research because the training data and models are often black boxes controlled by corporations, and the outputs can be unreliable, misleading, and biased.
These issues not only raise methodological questions but may have widespread societal ramifications as large language models and other generative AI are integrated into the home, workplace, and other institutions. This workshop will convene nearly two dozen social scientists to explore the use of generative AI in social science research. It is generously supported by the Institution for Social and Public Policy at Yale University and Yale's Data-Intensive Social Science Center.
Guest Speakers
- Elida Izani, Graduate student, Department of Sociology, Stockholm University
- Nga Than, Research Associate, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, The Graduate Center, CUNY
- Leanne Fan, Doctoral Candidate, Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, The Graduate Center, CUNY
- Brandon Stewart, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Princeton University
- Dustin Stolz, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Lehigh University
- Josh Nguyen, Graduate student, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania
- Jason Jones, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University
- Siwei Cheng, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University
- Austin van Loon, Postdoctoral Associate, Polarization Lab, Duke University
- Hannah Waight, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Social Media and Politics, New York University
- Étienne Ollion, Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS-CREST)
- AJ Alvero, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Florida
- Delia Baldassarri, Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver, and Enid Silver Winslow Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University
- David Broska, Graduate student, Department of Sociology, Stanford University
- Brandon Sepulvado, Senior Research Methodologist, NORC
- Junsol Kim, Graduate student, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
- Joscha Legewie, Professor, Department of Sociology, Harvard University
- Thomas Davidson, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Rutgers University
- Lisa Argyle, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Brigham Young University
- John Horton, Associate Professor of Information Technologies, MIT Sloan School of Management
- John Levi Martin, Florence Borchert Bartling Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
- Laurel Smith-Doerr, Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Elizabeth Roberto, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Rice University
- Tina Law, Postdoctoral Scholar, CUNY Graduate Center
- Oscar Stuhler, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
- Simone Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University
- Rina Bliss, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Rutgers University
- Chuncheng Liu, Postdoctoral Researcher, Microsoft Research New England
- Isaac Mehlhaff, Postdoctoral Scholar, Data Science Institute, University of Chicago
- Ya-Wen Lei, Professor, Department of Sociology, Harvard University
- James Evans, Max Palevsky Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
Event Sponsors
Contact
Daniel Karell | daniel.karell@yale.edu
Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
Yale University