UNC’s ‘Converge-Con’ covers all things AI, from rap battles to existential threats

This story, written by Mariah Temple ’28 with photos by June Brewer, was originally published on dailytarheel.com.

The UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media hosted its “Year 1” Converge-Con last week — the three-day artificial intelligence festival that offers interactive workshops, panel discussions and art exhibitions, connecting technology across disciplines. 

Scott Geier, founder of Converge-Con and assistant professor at the journalism school, said the festival was modeled after South by Southwest, an annual conglomeration of events that intersect film, music and technology in Austin, Texas. 

In an analogy to SXSW, Geier said that UNC doesn’t need another academic conference about AI, nor a trade show advertising the latest technology — it needs to bring the public together to discuss how the convergence of humans and AI is affecting everyone. 

“Why don’t we become the university hub for AI, not necessarily in research and development — although that’s awesome too, I guess — but in the conversation, right?” Geier said.

The festival kicked off Wednesday evening at local nightclub Still Life, where invitees watched a human versus AI rap battle, made possible by an app that Geier built to answer his own question about what an AI concert might look like. 

On Thursday and Friday, Converge-Con held numerous events exploring AI in relation to art, ethics, strategic communications, journalism, education and, through a mock criminal trial composed of an entirely AI jury, even law. 

Tyler Dukes, lead editor for AI innovation in journalism at McClatchy Media, spoke at “AI and the Modern Newsroom” on Thursday morning, highlighting how AI differs from previous technologies and ways it can be applied in the journalism industry.

Dukes emphasized that AI doesn’t know “truth” — only probability. In other words, large language models are great at predicting text, which leads to frequent hallucinations. He argued that if AI is used for journalism, it should be focused on tasks that are error-resilient so as to make human work more efficient.

“[Writing stories] is not a tight feedback loop, because if it takes me as long to fact-check an 800-word story that somebody has generated with AI than it would for me to write that 800-word story, you’re not giving me any efficiencies,” Dukes said in his presentation. 

That evening, Converge-Con held a town hall “Risk/Reward” meeting where community members gathered to listen and ask experts questions. The four speakers each discussed one major risk surrounding AI: rapid water and power consumption, deepfake footage, the automation of human jobs and its existential threat to humanity. 

CEO of Terra Trust Mike DiPetrillo explained AI’s threat to the power grid, encouraging audience members to find ways to generate their own power in preparation for increased blackouts. 

DiPetrillo said that a month ago, a Department of Energy study predicted that the power grid that spans from the Outer Banks of North Carolina, north into New York and west into Ohio, will experience 400 days of rolling blackouts over the next two years. This is due to massive data center growth within the region. 

In the same meeting, UNC philosophy professor Thomas Hofweber agreed with Nobel Prize-winning physicist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton’s assertion that there is a 10 to 20 percent chance that AI will lead to the human race’s extinction. Hinton is known as the “godfather of AI.”

Hofweber compared the risk to the endangerment of the chimpanzee, an animal physically stronger but slightly less intelligent than humans, and in competition for human resources. 

“[AI] might have some perfectly benign overall goal, perfectly reasonable goal. It just has no special concern for us,” Hofweber said. “So it will just try to get more data centers built. They will try to harvest more energy to power those data centers.”

Catherine Oxendine ’26 said she was relieved to see her concerns addressed in the town hall meeting, specifically those relating to job displacement and the strain on the power grid in communities where data centers are located.

Oxendine also attended several other Converge-Con events. She said that she appreciates the work UNC is doing to prepare its students for the future with events like the AI festival and the new “School of AI” merger. 

“I think it’s great because it’s going to position students at leading this,” Oxendine said. “And I think that’s what UNC has always done — has been a great educational leader and put its students in good positions to be successful.”

Geier said he thinks it would be more effective to incorporate AI into the entire UNC curriculum, rather than have one school in which students would have to find time to take specific electives.

Sara Lynn Loucks ’27 is a junior majoring in advertising and public relations and the social media marketing manager for Converge-Con. She said she has a more neutral take on AI overall, but thinks the new school will be a good way for UNC to be at the forefront of this new technology. 

“I think especially in advertising, [AI is] such a scary thing because people really look at it from this lens of complete opportunity or complete distraction, and it was really nice to see the practical applications in the real world,” Loucks said.