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Race-Making in the Age of AI

Nov 3, 2022, 5:00pm-6:00pm CT

AI shares with earlier socially transformative technologies a reliance on limiting models of the “human” that embed racialized metrics for human achievement, expression, and progress. Many of these fundamental mindsets about what constitutes humanity have become institutionally codified, continuing to mushroom in design practices and research development of devices, applications, and platforms despite the best efforts of many well-intentioned technologists, scholars, policy-makers, and industries. This in-person talk will explore why and how AI can be much more deeply integrated with the humanities and arts in the interest of equity and social justice, while considering the value of creativity vs innovation. Professor Elam will offer specific case studies of how AI artist-technologists of color represent race, ethnicity, gender and ability not as normative self-evident categories or monetizable data points, but rather in terms of racial formation: dynamic social processes always indexing political tensions and interests.

Join us November 3rd, from 5-6pm, at the Harper Center. Space is limited.

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Speaker

Michele Elam Placeholder

Michele Elam, Professor of Humanities, Stanford University

Michele Elam is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Humanities in the English Department at Stanford University, a Faculty Associate Director of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a Race & Technology Affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is former Director of African & African American Studies at Stanford.

Elam’s research in interdisciplinary humanities connects literature and the social sciences in order to examine changing cultural interpretations of gender and race. Her work is informed by the understanding that racial perception and identification in particular impacts outcomes for health, wealth and social justice. Her most recent scholarship focuses on how the humanities and arts function as key crucibles through which to frame and address urgent social questions about equity in emergent technologies.

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Michele Elam, Professor of Humanities, Stanford University

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