https://www.create.humanities.uva.nl/seminar-series/5389/ | The seminar series is organised by Anna Schjøtt Hansen, Dieuwertje Luitse and Tobias Blanke who are part of the Critical AI Research Group. It is supported by the University of Amsterdam Research Priority Area’s Human(e) AI and Global Digital Cultures and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis and hosted by Creative Amsterdam (CREATE).

Critical AI studies is an interdisciplinary ‘field in formation’ (Raley and Rhee, 2023), which aims to better understand, critique and provide alternatives to the current regimes of Artificial Intelligence (AI) development and implementations – from dataset production to model development, evaluation and deployment as well as social, political and institutional contexts that shape them.  

While Critical AI Studies is an interdisciplinary field it has a strong footing in the critical methodologies of humanities, social sciences and arts. With an overarching aim to foreground how humanities scholars can engage critically with AI, this emerging field provides the illustrative backdrop in this new seminar series, which aims to facilitate and stimulate conversations around the field of Critical AI Studies and inspire future research. 

The seminars are online, open to everyone and take place on a bi-monthly basis. For each seminar one or two prominent invited speaker(s) are invited to give a talk that engages theoretically or empirically with AI and address one or more of four overarching themes: (1) Ethics and Accountability, (2) Politics of Data (3) Politics of Machine Learning and (4) Methods on ML Research. 

October 25 from 5-7 PM CEST: What is Critical AI Studies and where is it heading?

Invited talk by Lauren M. E. Goodlad (Rutgers University) and Rita Raley (University of California, Santa Barbara). 

Lauren M. E. Goodlad is a distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the chair of a new interdisciplinary initiative on Critical Artificial Intelligence and as Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder of the new interdisciplinary journal Critical AI. Rita Raley is Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara and part of working group on Critical Machine Learning Studies and have recently co-edited a special issue on ‘Critical AI: A Field in Formation’. As a result, both Lauren and Rita are highly influential voices in the emerging field of critical AI and in this first seminar they will provide an overview of  field of Critical AI Studies and discuss where it might be heading in the future.