Yesterday, 5 May, Professor Christian Morgner, PhD, from the University of Portsmouth delivered a guest lecture entitled ‘Generative AI as a Question Laboratory: From Answers to Questions’ at the Faculty of Croatian Studies, University of Zagreb. The lecture was delivered to sociology students as part of the institutional DIGI-HR research project.
In his presentation, Professor Morgner challenged the dominant understanding of artificial intelligence as a technology that produces answers, proposing a different approach: generative artificial intelligence as a tool for creating, comparing and reframing questions. The lecture's starting point was that questions are not neutral, but already contain theoretical assumptions about the world, responsibility and social problems, and that research begins not with a question but with a situation of uncertainty that the question itself shapes and stabilises.
He particularly highlighted how standard research questions such as ‘What causes obesity?’ or ‘What is the impact of artificial intelligence on education?’ often predetermine how we understand a problem, directing research towards causes while overlooking the conditions that enabled a phenomenon to be recognised as a social problem in the first place. As an alternative, he proposed the analytical framework of ‘How is something possible?’, directing attention towards the social, communicative and institutional conditions in which particular phenomena emerge.
Central to the lecture was the idea of a ‘sociology of questions’ — an approach that investigates how certain questions become socially legitimate, relevant to research and politically important. Morgner demonstrated how every question simultaneously makes something visible while excluding something else, thereby shaping in advance the boundaries of research, the allocation of responsibility and possible social interventions.
Discussing generative artificial intelligence, Professor Morgner emphasised that its most important sociological potential may lie not in generating answers but in opening up new perspectives and creating alternative ways of asking questions. Through examples from health, alcohol consumption and education, he showed how artificial intelligence can serve as a tool for comparing different theoretical approaches and revealing hidden assumptions that structure social knowledge.
Christian Morgner highlighted that changing the question also changes how we understand social reality, actors and possible futures, and that generative artificial intelligence can become an important research tool for developing a more reflexive and critical sociology of contemporary social change.
Professor Morgner's stay at the Faculty of Croatian Studies is part of the guest lecture programme taking place this week within the DIGI-HR project. The next lecture will be delivered on Thursday, 7 May, by Professor Barry J. Gibson from the University of Sheffield.