As part of the William and Julia Edwards lecture in Philosophy and Religion program, Dr Christi A. Merrill, a professor of South Asian Literature and Postcolonial theory in University of Michigan- Ann Arbor was invited to give a speech on the complex relationships between text, image, and culture on Thursday March 20th in Malcolm Fields Theatre.
Merrill was introduced by a general surgeon who is one of the founders of Tri City Temple. Merrill started the talk with how AI fits into the broader theme of translation.
“I wanna start with a little bit of a riddle”, Merrill said, “we often think of riddles as having a very cheeky answer… [but these riddles don’t] and the reason I wanted to [say] that they go up in the AI idea is because I don;t think it’s really clear what our relationship is between the person asking questions and the person trying to respond”.
Merrill’s lecture dove into the world of, “The Twenty-five Tales of Vikram and the Vetala,” a consolidation of ancient Indian stories featuring the Vetala. While offering her definition of the Vetala, Merrill talked about the multifaceted translations that have arisen.
“A vampire sucks blood and nuts and what’s a vampire”, Merrill said,”There’s something really scary about that character, there’s a connection between life and death and so one translation I really like is undead”.
While talking about the nuances of translation, Merrill mentioned that there is no correct translation.
“You have to find a different way of reading rather than trying to find the authoritative version”, Merrill asserted.
Merrill explored the connections between human translation and Artificial Intelligence.
“I have been getting very interested in what I now know is called the multilingual digital humanities”, she said,”What I’ve been finding is a lot of time we are accepting some of the very [typical] monolingual mind sets behind a lot of these”.
Merrill established a digital library known as Hathi Trust which translates to Elephant trust and mentioned her experience with diversity in languages in the midwest.
“I was fortunate to get a mellon sawyer seminar, we decided to research what called sites of translation and the multilingual Midwest”, Merrill said, “The Midwest is not only English speaking, there a lot of different languages that get spoken….and I decided I was gonna really focus on the digital library hathi trust”.
While adding more thoughts on AI and its impact, Merrill mentioned its uses.
“I’ve been reading so many pessimistic articles about AI, but I wanna think about how AI might be used in a way that’s creative and really critical”, Merrill said,”One of the things that’s really hard if you can scan a text that’s in Hindi or Urdu, the Google team has not put as much money into non Roman writing systems”.
Jaden Martray, a computer science major attended the event and was intrigued by Dr Merrill’s observations about the two disciplines.
“My philosophy professor told me about [the event] and I felt interested because it’s philosophical and he said I could get [10% extra credit]”, Martray said, [Language Models] can do the basics like a a quick pseudo simple translation like colors or numbers but when you get into more philosophical or cultural things, doing one thing in one culture is different than another culture, right?”.
