Gabriele de Seta

Gabriele de Seta  received his PhD in 2016 at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Ethnology, Academia sinica in Taiwan in the period 2015 – 2017, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies, UiB from 2020 – 2023, in the ERC project, Machine Vision. He will now establish his own research group at the Faculty of Humanities to study people’s encounter with algorithms.

The TMF project’s overall research question looks at the interaction between algorithms and human creativity. De Seta’s main idea is that the complex relationships between algorithmic automation and everyday creativity are not satisfactorily conceptually clarified and empirically documented. The project is interdisciplinary between creativity and automation and will be studied based on a concept that De Seta has called algorithmic folklore. Examples of algorithmic folklore that the project will collect, analyze and compare are how users make use of machine industry models such as GPT-4, how people interpret decisions by social media algorithms, such as Tik Tok’s video recommendations, how these generate new, creative responses, which in turn influence the algorithms. He will also study differences in how different cultures relate to the algorithms.