CrAIC Launch Panel 2: Critical AI and Social/Data/Science

Artificial intelligence is everywhere in today’s headlines, simultaneously hailed as a revolutionary breakthrough, feared as a looming threat, and debated as if it were an unstoppable force. But AI is not a singular invention: it is a shifting set of technologies and ideas, bound up with the values and power relations of those who build and govern it. To understand AI critically, we need to see through the hype and doomerism, and ask deeper questions: Who designs and legitimises these systems? Who benefits from AI’s promises, who shoulders the risks and labour that sustain it? And, ultimately, why is AI dominating the present moment, and how can we question, resist, and reimagine it?

This workshop marks the launch of the Critical AI Centre at the University of Exeter.

Chair: Patrick Gildersleve

Speakers:

Mél Hogan, Queen's University

Peaks Krafft, University of Edinburgh

Sarah Shugars, Rutgers University

Milagros Miceli, Weizenbaum Institute