This seminar discusses the interplay between queerness and artificial intelligence (AI). Understanding queerness as a way to challenge "natural" or "commonsensical" perspectives and norms, we reflect on how such dominant representations structure and sustain AI technologies, as well as how to repurpose machine intelligence in critical and even subversive ways. Queering AI questions the established ideas regarding gender, sex (and binary thinking more generally) and highlights the ways in which computational models reify such categorizations. By drawing attention to the ways AI obscures multiplicities and paradoxes, but equally to the "glitches" and "errors" it produces in the process, we aim to "blast open" the black box and foreground queer theory as a method for imagining novel possibilities and realizations of AI.

Speakers:

Alicia Boyd (Post-doc, New York University)
Edmond Y. Chang (Lecturer, Ohio University)
Liz W Faber (Lecturer, University of Maryland)
Ute Kalender (Guest Professor, HFBK Hamburg)
Kalle Westerling (Research Application Manager, The Alan Turing Institute)

This event is part of the AI UK Fringe(Opens in new window). AI UK Fringe is organised by the Alan Turing Institute. Through a series of events between 4 – 29 March 2024, AI UK Fringe brings together leaders in academia from across the UK’s AI ecosystem to demonstrate, exhibit and update on their ground-breaking work.