Critical AI's second issue is out! Read it at the link in our profile.
Critical AI began as a new interdisciplinary initiative at Rutgers University, organized and led through a steering committee with support from the Center for Cultural Analysis and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. To learn more, see our website below.
For more information about the journal, or to share ideas, please email criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
To reach our editor directly, email lauren.goodlad@rutgers.edu.
Luke Munn, Liam Magee, Vanicka Arora, and Awais Hameed Khan introduce “Unmaking AI,” a framework for critically evaluating generative AI image models beyond surface-level bias metrics—focusing instead on business ecosystems, training data, and generative outputs in #criticalAI 3.2
Read the article here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/2834703X-12095973/406214/Unmaking-AI-A-Framework-for-Critical-Investigation
Nicolas Malevé and Katrina Sluis review THE BIRTH OF COMPUTER VISION (Dobson), highlighting how the book reconstructs the early history of computer vision and its ties to military funding, computational methods, and changing ontologies of the image.
In this book review, Aarthi Vadde examines AI SNAKE OIL (Narayanan and Kapoor) and CO-INTELLIGENCE (Mollick), highlighting how both books sift through noise to assess AI’s real capacities, limits, and social impacts.
In "Rethinking Error," historian Johan Fredrikzon goes to the very heart of a large language model's incapacity to "know": a problem the industry likes to call hallucinations, but which Fredrikzon calls "epistemological indifference."
Jakko Kemper examines how generative AI makes aesthetic production seem frictionless while relying on extractive infrastructures, linking everyday creative work to the “imperial mode of living.”
#PurnimaMankekar examines how information, Big Data, and algorithms are shaped by postcolonial histories and development projects, focusing on the Aadhaar biometric ID system in #india.
A nuanced look at how data becomes a tool of governance and world-making.
In "Endangered Judgment" political theorist Luke Ferndandez discusses the imperiousness of instrumental reason. Returning to Joseph Weizenbaum's distinction between calculation and judgment (which was borrowed from Hannah Arendt), Fernandez shows that when we treat machine logic as if it can replace human judgment, we risk everything that matters in decision-making: from contextual understanding to our responsibility to others.
Three artists from Algorithmic Resistance Research Group (“Cultural Red Teaming: ARRG! and Creative Misuse of AI Systems”) take on AI by flipping AI on its head, they turn its logic into a playful critique of creativity and control—a sharp read for anyone into art, tech, or resistance.
#CriticalAI is excited to circulate our new #ASKanEXPERT feature in which #TiffanyDeRewal puts #NotebookLM under the microscope.
The #CriticalAI Guest Forum welcomes op-ed from Ricky D. Crano, a Film and Media Studies Lecturer at UC Irving, on disturbing “AI”-related institutional changes in higher ed
Check out the sneak preview from #CriticalAI's upcoming issue, Nathaniel Myer's introspective review of "TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies" by Annette Vee, Tim Laquintano, and @cschnitz. https://criticalai.org/2025/03/07/sneak-preview-nathaniel-myers-textgened-review/
The School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin is hiring an Ad Astra Fellow in AI and Digital Cultural Heritage https://my.corehr.com/pls/coreportal_ucdp/erq_jobspec_version_4.display_form
We'll do a more full-throated introduction to our just-published issue in due course. But for now: here 'tis. Congrats to editors and all contributors. Please disseminate widely as free access disappears after the first few weeks!
“Companies like Airbnb, Lehane understood, could make arguments faster, and more efficiently, than nearly any political party or other special-interest group, and this was a source of considerable power. “The platforms are really the only ones who can speak to everyone now,” Lehane said.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster
And then this happened! Feeling proud of our little podcast, and grateful to @alex and Christie Taylor --- and our audience!
Wanna get in on the catharsis? Check out all of our episodes as podcast or video here:
We are currently organizing an online reading group for those interested in research and teaching on #criticalailiteracies.
Feel free to write us for more information criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu
We'd love to be in dialogue!
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...and the entire first part of a 2-part special issue that is now free to all readers (please encourage your library to subscribe to #CriticalAI - including a transcribed interview w/ Emily & Ted Chiang and many others! +
@kconrad's "Blueprint for AI Bill of Rights for Education" +
Our living document on teaching CAI literacies; and our student guide... + https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TAXqYGid8sQz8v1ngTLD1qZBx2rNKHeKn9mcfWbFzRQ/edit?tab=t.0
https://rutgers.app.box.com/file/1640499870205?s=ek4mxim2soxho6cb2m2x5ztv92vfqlr8
