By Anne Levin

Is ChatGPT an enhancement or a threat to creativity? At a panel conversation on October 3 at Princeton Public Library, the focus will be on how the artificial intelligence chatbot (ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a tool to assist and inspire rather than limit human creative endeavors.

“Creativity in the Age of ChatGPT,” to be held in the Community Room from 6 to 7:30 p.m., is co-hosted by the library, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. The discussion delves into how the chatbot “has kindled imaginations and stoked debate since it was launched by OpenAI in November 2022,” according to a release from the Council for the Humanities.

“I see this as the beginning of a conversation, so I anticipate more events like this to come,” said Carin Berkowitz, executive director of the Council for the Humanities. “When ChatGPT arrived, we saw a lot of hand-wringing in the newspapers. There seemed to be conversations tinged with alarm in our community.

“We thought it was important to take this beyond the initial panic. People who know the technology and the human pieces of it can talk us through. A lot of what ends up happening is that where it looks like this monolithic thing is coming to take over our lives, it isn’t. People have a lot of agency. They take these things and turn them on their heads. We wanted to open that up.”

The moderator for the event is Rishi Jaitly, Princeton University Class of 2004, former executive at Twitter (now X), Google, and YouTube, and current Distinguished Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Center for Humanities. Panelists are Min Li Chan, essayist, technologist, and Alphabet/Google alum; Edward Jones-Imhotep, director of Toronto University’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology; and engineering artist Helena Sarin.

“The internet and digital technologies have, in many ways, ushered in a new era of human connectivity,” said Jaitly. “One of the things that becomes clear when you have a front row seat at these digital platforms is the extraordinary amount of creativity around the world. In the last year, we’ve seen the rise of tools that take creative potential to the next level. The conversation in Princeton is to take a step back and reflect on the fact that we’re at the beginning of another new era of creativity, which yields lots of questions for things like government and education.”

Jaitly hopes people will leave the event “feeling empowered,” he said. “Part of what we do in this conversation is answer some of those questions. One might say that creativity, for a long time, has almost felt mystical — composing music, writing a novel, architecting a building — and in many ways, you could make the case that these technologies might serve to demystify. I’m confident that a new kind of creativity will emerge.”

“I’m a historian of science, so I tend to view things through a historic lens,” said Berkowitz. “There have been many times in the past where people thought a new technology would upend life. It’s rarely the case. It has just shifted where humanity finds its space.”

Following the panel, light refreshments will be served and there will be opportunities to talk informally with the program participants. Advance registration is recommended, but not required, at njhumanities.org/event/creativity-in-the-age-of-chatgpt.