Generative AI systems are at the heart of a profound shift in how we create, access, and define knowledge. The mass extraction of data across the internet, as well as from libraries and archives, raises pressing questions about who gets to build private AI models on public data. At the same time, AI systems are reshaping the planet in lasting, often hidden ways, becoming one of the largest planetary architectures built by our species and requiring vast amounts of energy, water, data, and labor to function.

This lecture will explore the dual nature of generative AI as a cultural transformation and a material force. Crawford will also discuss her recent research project and visual installation Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500, which places AI systems in a historical lineage of empires that used technology to centralize power and reshape societies and ecosystems on a global scale.

Kate Crawford is a scholar of artificial intelligence and its impacts. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a senior principal researcher at MSR in New York, and was the inaugural Visiting Chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Her most recent book, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and The Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, won the Sally Hacker Prize, and was named one of the books of the year by New Scientist and the Financial Times. Crawford leads the Knowing Machines Project, a transatlantic research collaboration of scientists, artists, and legal scholars that investigates how AI systems are trained. 

 The event will be held in English. Register on the page below.

This program is open to all eligible individuals. USC Annenberg operates all of its programs and activities consistent with the University’s Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.