Artificial Humanity? Generative AI, Culture and Human Subjectivity

Artificial Humanity? Generative AI, Culture and Human Subjectivity is a one-day internal symposium for staff and research students exploring the cultural, political and intellectual consequences of generative AI for the humanities and social sciences.

AI is not controversial solely because it automates pattern recognition, prediction or classification, but because it has been increasingly presented, understood and used through the language of human capability.

Terms such as “intelligence”, “thought” or even “art” are not neutral labels or metaphors when applied to the promises made by generative AI and its ideologues. Rather, such framings are guided by, and encourage, a very specific view of the intersection of culture, technology, effort, capital, skill and meaning that ventures uncomfortably close to difficult questions of subjective human experience.

For SOAS, these questions speak directly to our extensive work on language and translation, culture and media, art and restitution, labour and political economy, regulation, development, colonial and postcolonial knowledge formations, and the social life of technology across diferent regions, communities and diasporas.

This symposium will bring together SOAS researchers whose work – past, present or future – has brought them to consider or confront these problematics of generative artificial intelligence in the context of their own wider expertise.

Possible areas of discussion include AI and translation; machine fluency and linguistic authority; AI-generated media, misinformation and “slopaganda”; AI in art history, archives, heritage and restitution; sociologies of AI use; the role of platforms in development and global political economy; and the changing meaning and value of human skill, interpretation and deliberation in academic, creative and public life.

Moving beyond now-familiar polarities of enthusiasm and alarm, this one-day symposium will promote interdisciplinary conversation, sharing of works in progress, and future collaboration. If successful, it will inaugurate new fora for SOAS-centred humanities-led AI-adjacent research and teaching, grounded in regional expertise, critical traditions and sustained attention to the human subjects who create, use, resist and are acted upon by these systems.