Description

This roundtable invites a critical conversation about AI as a social and cultural phenomenon, one that cannot be separated from the economic, political, and ecological conditions that produced it. We will discuss how large language models, image generators, prediction tools, and algorithmic systems are not only changing how we work and communicate, but contributing to a slow degradation of literacy, public reasoning, and shared meaning. AI does not simply process culture, it shapes it, standardizes it, and feeds it back to us in increasingly uniform, predictable, and market-driven forms.

Criticisms of AI are legion, but they seem to have not slowed down its triumph one bit over our lives. Every app, every device and every tool is now “augmented“ by AI, making it nearly impossible to do anything without inadvertently contributing to our own obsolescence. Even writing this event description required blocking numerous AI tools from constantly trying to insert themselves in the middle of every sentence, like an annoying uncle at a holiday party.

The discussion will take a critical look at the ways AI currently corrodes the basic practices of thinking: the flattening of language in ChatGPT-style prose, the replacement of visual imagination with automated templates, and the erosion of deep reading, writing, and interpretation in favor of fast and frictionless output. Such transformations point beyond technology itself. They reveal a society already accustomed to speed, convenience, and outsourcing judgment, where thinking is a burden, creativity deskilled, and public culture reduced to algorithmic residue. This roundtable asks how we might still cultivate critical reflection, honest dialogue, and literacy skills in a moment when the tools we use to think are making thinking nearly impossible.