After GenAI: Conceptual Practice and Critique in the Age of Deep Learning
18. Nov
10am–6pm
Save the Date: On November 18, our workshop assembles four different perspectives on the disruptive environmentality and use of artificial intelligence: We will explore how it governs and interacts with politics, aesthetics, affect and institutions. Building on this, we will develop conceptual offers for a substantial critique of AI.
Algorithmic societies (Schuilenburg & Peeters 2021) are still reeling from the sudden epistemic onset of ChatGPT and the following LLM mania. Generic, superfluous content (so-called AI slop) is flooding the internet, anybody with access to the right tool can “vibe code” a software prototype, and every book can be turned into a podcast. Moreover, state-of-the-art reasoning models are rapidly integrated into the chain-of-command, collapsing the boundaries between research and military domains.
There is an argument to make that none of this is really new. AI has been adjacent to military funding since its emergence as a field; legislation often lags behind technological breakthroughs; and the humanities seem stuck in perpetual crisis caused by neoliberal restructuring and a lack of methods to frame such a multilayered disruption. However, the current radicalisation of the power-knowledge complex of environmentality (Hörl 2018) and its intersection with anti-democratic forms of governance (Coeckelbergh 2026) are unprecedented, irreversibly reconfiguring parts of the lifeworld and forcing nation-states to preemptively build out large scale computational infrastructure. Technologies of computation are a major catalyst of that disruptive process.
Instead of dismissing generative AI as a “stochastic parrot” (Bender et al. 2021) or accepting its corporate narrative as a tool to be learned in order not to be left behind, this workshop focuses on a set of fundamental questions to frame the problems of alignment, regulation, and actual use of AI systems. How are reading, writing, and thinking practices – as they are always already entangled with technics (cf. Stiegler 1998) – being reconfigured, on whose terms, and to what end(s)? What are viable modes of relating and responding to these shifts of technological lifeworlds?
The program will be posted here—stay tuned!
Researchers from Leuphana’s Embracing Transformation program and the research initiative The Disruptive Condition are working closely together to examine the connections between transformation and disruption processes. This workshop, organized by Dr. Henrike Kohpeiß (Transformation Lab) and Konstantin Mitrokhov (Disruptive Condition), is part of this effort.