What AI Means

David Zureick-Brown discusses how AI is changing mathematical research, from helping mathematicians discover new approaches and counterexamples to improving clarity and exploring problems that were previously difficult to tackle.

He also examines the challenges AI creates for mathematical norms around collaboration, attribution, credit, and trust.

Looking ahead, he considers both the exciting possibility of AI expanding our ability to understand mathematics and the more unsettling possibility that mathematics could become so easily solvable that it loses some of what makes it intellectually meaningful.

Amber Sweat, Assistant Professor of French at Amherst College, discusses how AI is reshaping language, media, and culture, particularly through questions of translation, voice, race, and representation.

She considers the possibility that increasingly capable AI could flatten linguistic and cultural differences, while emphasizing the importance of human-to-human interaction, individual expression, and the ways language shapes who we are.

In this episode of What AI Means, Lee Spector speaks with Brendan O’Connor, Associate Professor in the Manning School of Information and Computer Sciences and Co-Director of the Computational Social Science Institute at UMass Amherst. O’Connor discusses how AI is changing social science by expanding the kinds of questions and analyses they can pursue.

An interview with Genesis Baez, who is an assistant professor of art at Amherst College. Baez argues that AI reveals and amplifies many of the same questions photography has always raised about truth, bias, and representation. She emphasizes that neither photography nor AI is neutral, since both are shaped by human choices, data, and power structures.

In this episode, Laura Sizer, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, explores how AI acts as “thought experiments made real.” She examines limits of understanding, embodiment, and the Turing Test, arguing AI reflects human thinking but cannot fully replicate it.

In this episode of What AI Means, Nicholas D. Holschuh explores how AI is transforming Earth science. This conversation highlights how new tools are helping scientists better understand glaciers, climate uncertainty, and the future of our planet.

College of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University, and Chief Scientist and Joint Appointee at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Auroop Ganguly considers how AI is reshaping sustainability science, climate risk, and infrastructure resilience and what this means for our collective environmental future.

Study Room Manager and European Print Specialist at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Hruba considers how AI is reshaping practices in art-making, preservation, and curation and what this means for artistic interpretation.

Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Amherst College, Dole examines how AI intersects with questions of belief, interpretation, agency, and religious life.

Professor in Dramatic Arts (music) at Amherst College, Sawyer discusses AI’s role in performance, imagination, and collaborative creation.