Generative AI systems are at the heart of a profound shift in how we create, access, and define knowledge. The mass extraction of data across the internet, as well as from libraries and archives, raises pressing questions about who gets to build private AI models on public data. At the same time, AI systems are reshaping the planet in lasting, often hidden ways, becoming one of the largest planetary architectures ever built by our species and requiring vast amounts of energy, water, data, and labor to function.

Communicating the enormity of these technological and societal shifts to the broader public is of critical importance, so that individuals, communities, and policymakers can engage meaningfully with AI’s development. Evolving community needs and policy development, in turn, can actively inform new lines of inquiry in research. This talk will explore ways to map generative AI as both a cultural transformation and a material force, and demystify complex systems, as a way to contribute to public debates about artificial intelligence and its role in societies and ecosystems. 

Kate Crawford is a leading international scholar of the social implications of artificial intelligence. She is a Research Professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR in New York, an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and the inaugural Visiting Chair for AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.  Her latest book, Atlas of AI (Yale, 2021) won the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, the ASSI&T Best Information Science Book Award, and was named one of the best books in 2021 by New Scientist and the Financial Times. Over her twenty-year research career, she has also produced groundbreaking creative collaborations and visual investigations. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the V&A in London, and was awarded with the Design of the Year Award in 2019 and included in the Design of the Decades by the Design Museum of London. Her collaboration with the artist Trevor Paglen, Excavating AI, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. She has advised policy makers in the United Nations, the White House, and the European Parliament, and she currently leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research collaboration that investigates the foundations of machine learning. She was named on the TIME100 list as one of the most influential people in AI. Her latest exhibition, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power 1500–2025, opened in Milan, November 2023 and won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology.

Moderator
Matteo Valleriani