The Future of AI Critique

My talk has a double focus, addressing both the future of AI critique and the possible or desirable futures imagined and discussed within contemporary critiques of AI. The sociocultural imagination of AI has always tended to foreground the dystopian potential of this technology, and perhaps one important historical specificity of our time lies in the fact that a growing number of AI researchers and leading figures from the technology industry warn that we may indeed be approaching some form of dystopian future, however it might concretely be imagined, unless we take the appropriate precautions. At the same time, these circumstances give rise to a specific hermeneutics of suspicion when the very developers and pioneers who decisively shaped AI in its present form confront us so emphatically with the possibility that this or that dystopian scenario might actually become reality. It is striking in itself that the critique of AI is pursued so prominently by those who have substantially contributed to making AI the powerful force it has become. Equally significant, however, is that AI increasingly becomes both an object and a subject of critique as it participates in articulating the very criticism directed at it, although this role sometimes remains concealed, a concealment that itself warrants critique and points to the ideological relations in which both AI and its criticism are entangled. I will identify the challenges confronting any critique of AI that seeks to address the defining problems of our (post)digital culture and examine why existing forms of AI critique have so far fallen short of their own emancipatory aspirations.

Short Biography

Andreas Sudmann is a media scholar and AI researcher at the University of Bonn. Currently, he is the Scientific Coordinator and one of the Principal Investigators of the international research group HiAICS (How is Artificial Intelligence Changing Science? Research in the Era of Learning Algorithms), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation since 2022. From 2019-2022, he was the director of the research project "Media and Infrastructures of AI: Computer Vision, Transfer Learning and artificial neural networks as a black box", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). He is co-editor of the series AI critique, published by Transcript. Roughly ten years ago, Andreas Sudmann was one of the first researchers outside computer science to explore the sociocultural conditions, implications and effects of machine learning technologies. For his work on AI, he has been awarded several national and international fellowships.

salle de conférences, SCAI, bât. Esclangon, 1er ét., Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, Sorbonne Université