U of A Researcher Spotlight Series with Daniel Fried

Rethinking How We Engage with Generative AI

What happens when generative AI doesn’t replace our thinking, but changes the way we think?

Much of the conversation about AI in higher education has focused on whether students are using tools like ChatGPT to take shortcuts. But what if the more interesting question is how extended conversations with AI are reshaping human cognition, creativity and communication?

Join Daniel Fried from the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Arts for a thought-provoking exploration of how generative AI changes the way we write, think and communicate. He’ll explore why AI models often work best through extended dialogue, how prompting differs from traditional human writing and what conversations with non-human partners can reveal about language and thought.

Speaker Information

Daniel Fried is Professor of Chinese literature and intellectual history at the University of Alberta, Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies, and a recipient of the University’s McCalla Professorship for 2026. His research focuses on classical Chinese civilization during its ancient and medieval periods, with topics that intersect literature, philosophy, and history. Much of Daniel’s scholarship focuses on how Chinese writers and thinkers understood the nature and value of writing and communication; his first scholarly book, Dao and Sign in History, was about Daoist conceptions of semiotics in the early medieval period. His most recent scholarly book, The First Print Era, describes the formation of a nascent print culture from the 10th through 12th centuries. In March of this year, he published his first book intended for a general audience: The Activist: A Daoist Protest Manual explains how ideas from classical Daoism can be used to reimagine social and political activism in gentler and more effective ways. His current scholarly project, Writing for the Machines: From Prompt Engineering to Prompt Composition, is under contract with Cambridge University Press.