Call for Contributions:
Critical AI Studies?
Conference October 9–10 · Proposals due July 31
“Artificial intelligence, to quote Phil Agre, 'is philosophy underneath'—in other words, all the important questions that emerge from today’s machine learning models are questions that the humanities have been addressing for centuries.”
read more from an interview with Co-Directors Fabian Offert and Rita Raley
Why humanities?
With the rise of large AI models trained by mining and extracting the cultural archive, almost all data is now cultural data. AI models are already writing history—we need to know what is being recorded, and how, and by whom. We believe that scholars in the humanities are particularly well-equipped to meet this new technological reality by leveraging their expertise in history, philosophy, politics, and cultural studies in service of a rigorous empirical analysis of machine learning techniques and implementations.
Why machine learning?
As the field of Critical AI starts to coalesce, the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning seeks to move beyond analysis of artificial intelligence as a media discourse and instead foregrounds the actual techniques, models, and systems informing that discourse. We believe that the most productive critical work forgoes convenient abstractions and remains grounded in the specific technical-material practices of machine learning.
Why UCSB?
UC Santa Barbara already enjoys an internationally recognized profile in the Digital Humanities, making our campus a natural locus of next-generation humanistic work in the domain of artificial intelligence. The Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning facilitates and promotes diverse research from faculty across humanities and fine arts departments in areas such as machine vision, large language models, creative coding, and technological infrastructures.
“It is our firm belief that the classroom has to become something like a counterweight to popular (mis)information about artificial intelligence... The students are eager to learn ways to look behind the scenes, and our pedagogies take this into account.”
read more from an interview with Co-Directors Fabian Offert and Rita Raley
