Alan Liu, English | 2024-2025 Faculty Research Lecturer

Lecture: 4 pm | Light refreshments to follow

AI Virtue: What’s “Good” Knowledge in the Age of Artificial Intelligence?

In the age of AI, what will be good knowledge? Alan Liu applies digital humanities methods to map epistemic virtues (like “true,” “accurate,” “creative”) used to discuss artificial intelligence. “Creativity” comes in for special attention as an example. Exploring this landscape of value, he considers how a framework might be developed for evaluating the knowledge worth of AI—one less locked into values formed around pre-AI “knowledge work” agents or structures, and more open to the future values of “generativity.”

BIO | Alan Liu is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the English Department at University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught from 1987 to 2025. He was an affiliated faculty member of UCSB’s Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) and Media Arts & Technology program (MAT). Previously, he was on the faculty of Yale University’s English Department.

Liu began as a scholar of British romantic literature and art. His first book, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989), explored the ambivalent relation between the imaginative experience of literature and the sense of history in the period of the French Revolution. In a series of theoretical essays in the 1990s, he explored the “new historicism,” cultural criticism, and postmodernism.

Subsequently, he turned to the digital humanities, starting his Voice of the Shuttle website for the humanities in 1994; the UCSB Transcriptions Center for digital humanities and new media in 1998; and the UC multicampus Transliteracies Project on online reading in 2005-2010. His monographs on the digital humanities and the information age (and our digital era’s missing, or transformed, sense of history) include The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2004); Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008), and Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (2018). A book he co-edited on Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (2026) has also just appeared. As chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Information Technology in 2022-23, he was lead author of the MLA’s 2024 Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Scholarship.

Liu is also active in the public humanities. He founded the 4Humanities.org advocacy initiative, which uses digital humanities to speak up for the humanities; led the Mellon Foundation-funded "WhatEvery1Says" project, which applies computational methods to study how the humanities are perceived in public; and co-founded the Center for Humanities Communication, which borrows the model of “science communication” to train and provide resources for “humanities communicators.”

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Established in 1954, the Faculty Research Lecturer is the highest honor the UC Santa Barbara faculty can bestow on one of its members. Each year the Academic Senate recognizes one individual for their outstanding academic and creative achievements and invites them to present their work to the campus community.

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