CCS BARD

At a moment when artificial intelligence is reshaping debates about knowledge, creativity, labor, and judgment, this symposium seeks to move beyond familiar discussions of AI as either a tool of innovation or a source of disruption, exploring what it does to the institutions and practices that have long organized cultural and intellectual life. Universities, museums, publishing houses, archives, research centers, and artistic communities all derive their authority from acts of judgment: selecting, interpreting, evaluating, attributing value, constructing narratives, and distinguishing significance from noise. It is precisely at this level that AI intervenes most forcefully. Bringing together artists, curators, scholars, and critics, the symposium will explore AI as a challenge to artistic authorship, the shifting relationship between generation and judgment, the politics embedded within seemingly neutral technical systems, the reconfiguration of labor, and the question of whether machine learning expands the horizons of imagination or merely automates existing forms of thought. At the same time, it will attend to the environmental and infrastructural costs that often disappear behind the spectacle of technological innovation. Ultimately, the symposium proposes that the most urgent questions raised by AI are not technological but institutional, cultural, and ethical: what becomes of expertise, criticism, education, and cultural value when the production of plausible knowledge, images, and interpretations can increasingly be delegated to machines? What happens to institutions built on judgment when judgment itself becomes automated?

Full list of speakers and schedule will be available shortly.