Event Recap / November 2023

“Generative AI: Race, Art, and Power” Lecture featuring Michele Elam

On November 9, Professor Michele Elam joined the Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Group (AFOG), the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and the CITRIS Policy Lab for the second lecture in the Fall Series, “Generative AI: Race, Art, and Power.” Elam’s presentation, “The Impact of Generative AI on the Creative Industry,” explored the questions of what the future of work is for creators, and what “creativity” really is in the age of AI. She discussed the ways in which the SAG-AFTRA strike can be seen as a microcosm of urgent generative AI issues.

Michele Elam is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Humanities in the English Department at Stanford University, a Faculty Associate Director of the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a Race & Technology Affiliate at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Elam’s research in interdisciplinary humanities connects literature and the social sciences in order to examine changing cultural interpretations of gender and race. Her work is informed by the understanding that racial perception in particular impacts outcomes for health, wealth and social justice. More recently, her scholarship examines intersections of race, technology and the arts. “Making Race in the Age of AI,” her most recent book project, considers how the humanities and arts function as key crucibles through which to frame and address urgent social questions about equity in emergent technologies.