The initiative DIGHUM lectures started with regular online events to discuss the different aspects of Digital Humanism. The bidt and the TU Wien are cooperation partners for DIGHUM lecture series.
Speaker: Gordon Burtch (Questrom School of Business, Boston University, USA)
Moderator: Enrico Nardelli (University of Roma ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy)
Generative artificial Intelligence technologies, especially large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, are revolutionizing information acquisition and content production across a variety of domains. These technologies have a significant potential to impact participation and content production in online knowledge communities. We provide initial evidence of this, analyzing data from Stack Overflow and Reddit developer communities between October 2021 and March 2023, documenting ChatGPT’s influence on user activity in the former. We observe significant declines in both website visits and question volumes at Stack Overflow, particularly around topics where ChatGPT excels. By contrast, activity in Reddit communities shows no evidence of decline, suggesting the importance of social fabric as a buffer against the community-degrading effects of LLMs. Finally, the decline in participation on Stack Overflow is found to be concentrated among newer users, indicating that more junior, less socially embedded users are particularly likely to exit.
About the Series
A roughly bi-weekly seminar offers presentations and panels from worldwide thought leaders. It is typically held on Tuesday afternoons at 17:00 CET.
The bidt and the TU Wien are cooperation partners for DIGHUM lecture series.
Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationship between man and machine. It acknowledges the potential of Informatics and IT. At the same time, it points to related apparent threats such as privacy violations, ethical concerns with AI, automation, and loss of jobs, and the ongoing monopolization on the Web.
For this reason, a new initiative — DIGHUM lectures — started with regular online events to discuss the different aspects of Digital Humanism.
We will have one or more speakers on a specific topic followed by a discussion, or panel discussions, depending on topic and speakers. The exact dates will be announced at least two weeks before.
Participate via Zoom
Participate VIA YouTube
Archive and Resources of Lecture Series