Event details

This talk presents material from Sonja Drimmer's current project, "Extracting the Past: How AI Is Stealing History to Rob Our Future." Broadly, the book offers an account of the artificial intelligence industry’s reliance on historical artifacts, the labor of historians, and a perverse recounting of history itself. In this talk, she will focus on non-generative forms of machine learning—computer vision in particular—as both the driving force behind some of the AI industry’s most profitable ventures and the bedrock of the political project that this industry is enabling. She will discuss how art historians working within museums and universities have—wittingly and unwittingly—played an important role in this industry’s development, and how an inordinate focus on generative AI threatens to obscure the now-mundane uses of a technology that is being leveraged to dismantle the foundations of civil society.