Critical Machine Learning Studies

Fabian Offert
Germanic and Slavic Studies
UC Santa Barbara

Rita Raley
English
UC Santa Barbara

Participants

This working group aims to articulate, from within the humanities, a technically specific and situated paradigm for engaging machine learning. Academic work on artificial intelligence seems now to be omnipresent, precisely because AI itself is such a rapidly developing field of research with widespread practical implementations lagging only slightly behind. The focus of many of these academic initiatives is genealogical, philosophical, and political. While we by no means eschew such perspectives, what we contribute is a framework that yokes the theoretical and the practical by focusing on specific machine learning architectures, rather than understanding artificial intelligence as a technically and ideologically homogeneous cultural technique. We leverage, in a collaborative and interdisciplinary way, the combined experience of UC faculty to design new approaches to describe, and critique in detail, contemporary machine learning systems. We focus on their individual (“ML studies”) rather than collective (“AI Studies”) properties, and on their architecture-specific rather than model-specific biases and shortcomings.