[Air-L] Call for Interventions and Contributions: Shifting AI Controversies

[Christian Katzenbach]

Dear colleagues, 

We are holding the final conference of our project Shaping AI (shaping.org) in late January 2024 in Berlin. I can imagine that many of you would be great contributors. Please consider submitting and distribute the call where you see fit. 

Best,
Christian 

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Call for Interventions and Contributions: Shifting AI Controversies

On behalf of the international research project Shaping 21st Century AI, the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the ZeMKI, University of Bremen, in cooperation with the research group “Politics of Digitalization” at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), invite to an international conference on the topic of AI controversies. 

The conference will hold keynotes, panels and interventions on the topic of AI controversies. Abstracts should be submitted no later than 30 October 2023.

CONFERENCE 
Shifting AI Controversies 
Prompts, Provocations & Problematisations for Society-Centered AI 
29 & 30 January 2024
Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), Germany
https://www.hiig.de/en/cfc-shifting-ai-controversies/

Controversies about AI abound, especially since ChatGPT took over the Internet by storm, becoming the most popular applications in the Web’s history within only a few months. The current excitement about the perils and prospects of general purpose AI applications like ChatGPT is only the most recent wave of public interest in the long history of “artificial intelligence” (AI). With its metaphysical imaginaries of human-machine symbiosis, anthropomorphic robots and machine thinking, arguably oversized scientific claims and technological developments in this field have always raised concerns. What the current debate makes much more visible than previous attention cycles, though, is that contemporary AI companies and scientists dominate not only the discourse promoting AI’s prospects but also that on AI’s perils. From engineers at OpenAI to research pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, technologists and industry-based scientists increasingly articulate warnings that AI might cause serious and fundamental damage to societies. With this move, the already dominant players are now also occupying the space of public critique, yielding the risk that activism, social science, critical journalism and the arts are pushed even further to the margins of public and expert debates. Are we currently having the public controversies on AI that we should have, or is AI panic derailing us from actual and relevant concerns? How do we get to the controversies that we need and to the exploration and articulation of society-centered AI?

Read the full call text: https://www.hiig.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Shifting-AI-Controversies.pdf

Submission

We welcome contributions from scholars of diverse disciplines as well as interventions from civil society, practitioners and developers. Your submissions should engage with the questions and provocations posed in the complete call for contributions. 

Extended abstracts of approximately 4,000 to 6,000 characters in length (excl. references) should be submitted no later than 30 October 2023 via the link below. Speakers will be notified by 16 November 2023.
https://www.hiig.de/en/cfc-shifting-ai-controversies/