How do tech­no­lo­gic­al devel­op­ments and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence influ­ence lan­guage learn­ing and trans­la­tion? Are tech­nic­al innov­a­tions lead­ing to fun­da­ment­al changes in this area? And how can learners, teach­ers, trans­lat­ors and all those who work with for­eign lan­guages deal with these changes? Where are the pos­it­ive bene­fits? What oppor­tun­it­ies are opened? Where are the poten­tial risks? 

These ques­tions were the focus of the Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence on Glob­al Per­spect­ives on Tech­no­logy-Enhanced Lan­guage Learn­ing and Trans­la­tion, or GLOTECH for short. The con­fer­ence took place on 12 and 13th Decem­ber 2024 online. GLOTECH was organ­ized by the Digit­al Learn­ing Research Group at the Uni­ver­sity of Alic­ante.   

Nina Kal­wa rep­res­en­ted RHET AI on the first day of the con­fer­ence and was a guest key­note speak­er. "Talk­ing about AI in Journ­al­ist­ic and Social Media con­clu­sion" was the title of her presentation. 

In terms of con­tent, Nina Kal­wa focused on talk­ing about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in the press and on social media. In doing so, she high­lighted two aspects: On the one hand, she spoke about how the con­cep­tu­al­iz­a­tion of AI as a black box shapes social know­ledge about AI and how the them­at­iz­a­tion of loss of con­trol and mis­trust is also related to the concept of the black box. Although, in the com­puter sci­ence and com­pu­ta­tion­al lin­guist­ics debate, the term does not always have neg­at­ive con­nota­tions. On the oth­er hand, the gen­er­al dis­course about sup­posedly fake videos on social media played a role, show­ing that people are now per­man­ently more skep­tic­al about online media. For example, users are ask­ing them­selves more fre­quently wheth­er a Tinder pro­file is actu­ally real or AI-gen­er­ated, or wheth­er it is really a politi­cian speak­ing in a video. Dis­trust was the over­arch­ing theme that linked the two highlights. 

Accord­ing to Nina Kal­wa, the con­clu­sion that can be drawn for sci­ence com­mu­nic­a­tion is that sci­ent­ists also appear as act­ors in the dis­course and con­sti­tute a real­ity by talk­ing about AI. It is there­fore import­ant that sci­ent­ists speak reflect­ively and respons­ibly about the sub­ject area of AI and devel­op a sens­it­iv­ity for the social per­cep­tion of AI. 

Nina Kal­wa her­self sums up the con­fer­ence as fol­lows: "It was a great exper­i­ence for me to be able to speak at GLOTECH 2024 in Alic­ante and to address lan­guage-gen­er­at­ing AI in such a fun­da­ment­al way in a digit­al lan­guage learn­ing research environment."

Fur­ther inform­a­tion about the con­fer­ence and the pro­gram can be found here.