Dr. Simon Roloff

This seminar examines the claim that artificial intelligence is not only a set of technologies but a cultural formation — a way of organising knowledge, labour, language, vision, and decision-making through specific operations of meaning-making. The changes AI brings to professional and social fields depend on these operations as much as on its technical capabilities.
The seminar is structured around four such operations through which AI reshapes the fields it touches: classifying (how AI is built on labels and taxonomies, and in turn re-categorises society); correlating (what happens to knowledge and intelligence once they become dependent on statistics); generating (what happens when humans lose their classical role in knowledge and creative work); and deciding (where automated bureaucracy and policing raise new questions of accountability). Each operation will be examined by reading central texts from Critical AI Studies (Crawford, Paglen, Amoore, Bender, Eubanks, Buolamwini, Pasquinelli, and others) alongside the analysis of concrete artefacts: datasets, generative outputs, real cases of algorithmic decision-making.
Students will present and discuss texts in class and take part in applied exercises. For assessment, they write a Field Brief: they choose a concrete AI application in a field of their own (close to their major), analyse it along the four operations, and conclude with a recommendation for an actor-role in that field.