Critical Dialogues on AI

This event aims to bring together colleagues across the University of Warwick interested in exploring critical perspectives on AI, including its ethical implications, societal impacts, and the narratives that shape our understanding of its rapid expansion. This is an opportunity to meet others who are interrogating the development, deployment, and consequences of AI technologies.

 

For further information and to register: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/schoolforcross-facultystudies/igsd/wcgpn/ai/

 

Recuperating, remembering and reporting on older women on screen at scale with an inclusive and interdisciplinary methodology requires significant integration of human-centred histories and memories of film and TV with machine learning. Ten years ago, researchers at USC Viterbi School of Engineering led a project with USC Annenberg (Communication Sciences), Google LA and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and SeeJane. They were coding film characters and developing an automated machine learning approach to gender and time on screen. Tanaya Guha brought that research to Warwick and with Joanne Garde-Hansen explored more deeply gender and age on screen. Guha (now at Glasgow) and Garde-Hansen (now at Leeds) joined with Sanjay Sharma (Warwick), secured Leverhulme funding for the Women, Ageing and Machine Learning on Screen project (2024-2027). Close readings of women and age in media texts are a defining feature of the field of study (Dolan 2012, Gorton and Garde-Hansen 2013, Richardson 2018). Critical approaches to media archive technologies (Parikka 2013), data justice and feminism (see D’Ignazio and Klein) and machine learning for social and cultural memory (Merrill 2023) all intersect in this research in ways we will discuss.

 

In this seminar, we present the underlying basis and questions of our research from an arts, social sciences and computing collaboration that seeks to analyse media texts at scale and report back to audiences and industry. Gender and ageing on screen, film and TV archetypes, genres and face recognition models drawn from ready-made training data will be explored, in terms of HOW we have approached the problem in this first year of the research programme. Why is such a ‘way of seeing’ women’s age on screen useful? What does screen ageing look like for film and TV scholars and what does it look like to machine learning? How does this research afford ‘ways of speaking’ to the film and TV industry by unlocking new ways of generating data, and what does it say about remembering older women on screen through the ‘calculation’ alongside the ‘culture’ of ageing?

D’Ignazio and Klein (2020) Data Feminism: From Data Ethics to Data Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Dolan (2012) Ageing Femininities: Representation, Identities, Feminism, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press

Gorton & Garde-Hansen (2013) ‘From old media whore to new media troll: The online negotiation of Madonna’s ageing body’, Feminist Media Studies, 13:2, 288-30

Merrill, Sam (2023) ‘Artificial intelligence and social memory: towards the cyborgian remembrance of an advancing mnemo-technic’ in Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence edited by Simon

Lindgren, Cheltenham: Edwin Elgar pp. 173-186

Parikka, Jussi (2013) ‘Archival Media Theory: An introduction to Wolfgang Ernst’s Media Archaeology, in Wolfgang Ernst Digital Memory and the Archive, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-22

Richardson (2018) Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema, London: Bloomsbury

 

In this CDI TV Stream we will engage in an interdisciplinary and collective dialogue on the ethical, political and social implications of AI. We explore AI in relation to environmentalism, inclusivity and democracy. The event will take place in person in FAB 1.16 and be streamed live. Speakers include Jo Garde Hansen, Tanaya Guha, Sebastian Lehuede, Bahareh Heravi, Sanjay Sharma. Hosted by Carolina Bandinelli. Produced by the Media Lab. To join online go here. If attending in person, you'll be pleased to know there will be cold beers available—and the evening will conclude with a pizza and prosecco reception.

 

CDI-TV is an experimental initiative from the Centre for Digital Inquiry dedicated to the exploration of digital media culture through hybrid livestreaming. You can think about it as a talk show for intellectually minded people with a taste for quirky digital aesthetic. The mood is very informal, it is not going to be scholars showcasing their accomplishments or explaining theories, we rather try to co-produce some (new?) knowledge in an open debate. Humor is very welcome. You can have a look at our last episodes here https://www.youtube.com/@centrefordigitalinquiryuni1068

 

Joanne Garde-Hansen is Professor of Culture, Media and Communication and Head of School of Medias and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Jo’s research focus upon media, memory, archives, heritage and creativity on screen. She co-founded the Centre for Television Histories with colleagues at the University of Warwick and has collaborated with geographers, water scientists and the Centre for Floods, Communities and Resilience on the relationship between culture and water. She has published on media and memory, television, archives, and water memories, recently completing two books: Media and Water (2021) and Museums, Archives and Protest Memory (2024).

Tanaya Guha is a Senior Lecturer of Computing Science at University of Glasgow, where she is a founding member of the Social AI group. Prior to joining Glasgow, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick. Her research focuses on developing AI capabilities to understand human behaviour combining Deep Learning, Computer Vision, and Signal/Speech Processing for domains of direct societal importance including mental health and media analysis. She is/was a member of the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Pervasive Computing, and Nature Scientific Reports.

Sanjay Sharma is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. His research interests involve studying technologies of race and racism from critical data justice, decolonial and abolitionist perspectives. His current research projects are focussing on social harms produced by the deployment of AI and automated decisions making systems. Sanjay’s research approach develops interdisciplinary methodologies to grasp how race and other intersectional exclusionary practices are emergent digital phenomena, mutating through entanglements with networked relations, algorithmic profiling, datafication, platform architectures and economies.

 

Sebastián Lehuedé is a Lecturer in Ethics, AI and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. His research focuses on the governance of digital technologies from a global social justice perspective. His current project, AI’s Nature, explores the connection between Artificial Intelligence and environmental justice. In this work, he has engaged with urban, peasant and Indigenous communities in Latin America mobilising against a data centre project, resisting lithium extraction and participating in conservationist initiatives. Sebastián is a member of the International Panel on the Information Environment and regularly collaborates with digital rights, international organisations and other actors outside academia

 

Bahareh Heravi is a Reader in AI and Media at the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI. Her research is primarily focused on Data & Computational Journalism, data storytelling, responsible and inclusive AI, information design, and the use of AI in journalism and media. She is currently a BRAID Fellow with BBC R&D, working on Enhancing Responsible AI Literacy in Journalism. Bahareh is a founding co-chair of the European Data & Computational Journalism Conference, and a steering committee member of the Computation + Journalism Conference. She sits on the Irish Government's Open Data Governance Board, and serves on the EDI advisory board of the Royal Statistical Society.

 

Carolina Bandinelli is an Associate Professor in Media and Creative Industries at the University of Warwick. Her research explores new cultures of love in digital societies, and creative biographies in the media and culture industries. Carolina’s work on digital love has featured in prominent media outlets, including the New York Times, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, and the BBC.

Cultural and Media Policy Studies