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THE RIFKIND CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES AND ARTS PRESENTS

Stripmining History: How the 'AI' Industry Extracts the Past & What Scholars in the Humanities Can Do to Stop It

A talk by Professor of History Sonja Drimmer

Thursday, October 16, 5:00 – 6:30 pm

IN PERSON (NA 6/316) and

Universities and museums have recently begun partnering with technology firms like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, who have promised that their AI products will enhance both historical research and accessibility to historical collections. These promises, however, are not supported by the reality of what computer vision—a foundational branch of AI—can achieve.

This talk provides an introduction to computer vision's origins in military surveillance, an overview of its development under late capitalist regimes of exploitative micro-labor, and an orientation to how computer vision works. This vision has relied on extracting history, and Drimmer argues that it is the responsibility of scholars in the humanities to be knowledgeable about the forms this extraction takes.

Sonja Drimmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 403–1476 (UPenn, 2018) and is currently completing a monograph titled Impressive Politics: Print before the Press in Late Medieval England. Her writing on AI has appeared in venues like Artforum, The International Journal for Digital Art History, Art in America, and Art News.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC