Keeping up with AI

Meeting Room. Our public and private lives are increasingly determined by a new era of AI technologies. As our individual lives, workplaces, and public institutions alike race to keep up with the pace set by recent market innovations in large language models, frontier-making projects of the AI infrastructure industry, such as large data centers, are simultaneously claiming our land, water, and ecology. In this talk, Erin McElroy (Associate Professor, UW Geography) and Sucheta Ghoshal (Assistant Professor, UW Human-Centered Design and Engineering) argue that questioning AI itself for the governing logics it is designed to support helps us understand our own subjecthood in this era of AI expansionism. They explore what it means to perform being a “good” or “bad” AI subject, inviting the audience to consider: how does one resist joining a mode of AI cultishism in various spaces of governance, and how do we better assess some of the motivations driving the material and imaginative AI landscapes transforming before our eyes? There will be time for a Q&A after the presentation.