Fenwick @fenwick is kicking off our AI symposium @Milieux_news. Let’s use #unstable23 as hashtag, ok? 2 days of promising talks ahead of us: https://machineagencies.milieux.ca/unstable-diffusions/, incl @abpowell, Lucy Suchman, @bhaggart, @Mayameme, …
(un)Stable Diffusions - Machine Agencies

A two-day international symposium on AI's publics, publicities, and publicizations at Milieux Institute, Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Rens Dimmendaal & Johann Siemens / Better Images of AI / Decision Tree reversed / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0 May 23 to May 24, 9am to 5pm Online and in person at Milieux Institute EV Building, 1515 Saint-Catherine St WMontreal Quebec

Machine Agencies - An experiment between human and machine intelligences.
After three remote presentation (that I have been hosting, so no time for posts), Kai-Hsin Yung is presenting critical data studies work on ImageNet and AlexNet #unstable23 //@[email protected] @Milieux_news
Kai-Hsin with a great combination of high-level and on-the ground observations to understand the data value chain of AI. #unstable23
Now, we are starting w/panel on Media Representation of AI. Onurhan Ak from Queen’s University on fieldwork in AI research lab. In the face of unstructured data, AI research needs (1) standardization (struggling with very diverse sets of data, as in press releases, news articles, …), and (2) association (most data lacks unique ID, so you don’t know that data is referencing the same entity). That’s why social media data is so attractive for AI research. #unstable23 /@[email protected]
Next in the panel is @[email protected] on „The Media Coverage of Generative AI: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly“. Great run-through re: all the concerning issues with AI representation in the media, now looking at in its most recent wave in the context of #chatGPT #unstable23
Now in the all-star keynote panel, @marionfourcade is kick-off on the re-wiring of our social institutions during the pandemic – that is here to stay in many ways (incl. Marion’s remote participation at #unstable23).
The study that @marionfourcade is presenting at #unstable23 investigates the platformisation of education in schools.
Next up, @[email protected] with a cautious and funny intervention on where the discourse on AI is, and where we should be heading to #unstable23
Then Mona Sloane talks about AI and access to labor markets. Interesting focus on querying data for discretionary decision making is changing away from boolean search #unstable23
Finaly, Lucy Suchman with a fascinating close reading of a video ad by Palantir on their AIP military operation system, with a focus on the underlying imaginaries. Interesting (and quite frightening, actually) to see that the text-based chat interface (just like #ChatGPT) is the dominant mode of operation here as well #unstable23
And: @Milieux_news at Concordia, and Montreal more broadly, is really a quite wonderful and impressive place. I hope I have the chance to make up for my cancelled (there was a pandemic!) fellowship research stay in Montreal #unstable23
@cka ooooooh, I’d LOVE to have seen that!
@codingconduct She is writing on that, so you need some patience but you will have the chance.