Cultural AI Lab

Richard Jean So is the Director of the Cultural AI Lab at Duke University, where he is the Rhodes Chair in Digital Humanities and Associate Professor of English. His research examines what changes when machines and artificial intelligence become participants in culture: making it, consuming it, and judging it. Methodologically, he combines close reading of how culture actually works with large-scale computational analysis, experiments, and surveys, asking how people decide what counts as slop, what the current creative capacities of LLMs are and how they can be extended, how humans and machines compete for interpretive authority in a world increasingly defined by human-AI interaction, and what the downstream effects of AI model collapse are on digital culture — are we seeing a related cultural collapse?

These are humanistic questions being decided at technical scale, and his work operates at the intersection of cultural studies and computer science: it appears in PMLA and Critical Inquiry, as well as PNAS, ICLR, and CHI. His research has been supported by both humanistic and scientific organizations, such as the ACLS and Schmidt Sciences.

Visit his personal website for more information.