Illinois professor Ted Underwood cast as an AI optimist

Back in December 2023, Business Insider profiled not a Silicon Valley founder but Ted Underwood, a professor of Information Sciences and English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, arguing he was making "one of the strongest, most compelling cases for the value of artificial intelligence" in a world of "artificial intelligence skeptics and chatbot alarmists."

Underwood's own writing puts the case in humanistic rather than commercial terms. On his site, he treats AI as a "cultural technology" alongside writing and printing, and pushes back on the industry's default script. "The upside of AI, apparently, is that super-intelligence replaces human agency," he writes, and he says that framing depresses people because "it's not clear what we get to do in this picture."

His research uses generative models to study literary history at scale. He has argued the same tools, read as models of culture rather than productivity engines, could help scholars "construct new genres" and surface genuinely new cultural forms.