MeST talk by Joe Dumit

 A warm invitation to a MeST talk by Joe Dumit, Professor of Anthropology at University of California Davis and Professor of Interdisciplinary Data Collaborations in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. The talk is co-hosted by DataSpace and the Ethnographic Exploratory.

Title: The DataSpace of LLM Medical Advice: Epistemic Divergence for the Masses

Description: LLMs are trained on embodied, performative, situated texts, not language. Every stage of LLM use for medical advice is shaped by divergence in possible answers based on each word in the prompt, each rewriting of that prompt by the model, each assumption of problem space, each search result in order, each uncertainty downgrading in summaries, each word of summary response. A forest of forking responses is presented as a singular confident and evidentiary answer - not necessarily true or false, but certainly hiding its potential confounders. This talk will trace this process of potential erasure of patient experience even as patients experience someone listening to them and all of their symptoms.

Everyone is welcome! Please note that the talk will be held in the Ethnographic Exploratory, CSS 4.1.12. We hope to see many of you there.