NYU Shanghai's Center for AI Culture (AIC) investigates the philosophical and cultural implications of artificial intelligence as it suffuses and transforms the contemporary world. Closely affiliated with the academic community of Interactive Media Arts, AIC benefits from an extensive network of scholars, artists and practitioners. The Center makes full use of its location in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai at the premier Sino-American university to research the cutting edge of emerging planetary media.
Research
Our research draws on philosophy (from both the ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions), media theory, the history of science and computation broadly conceived, cultural and artistic practice, as well as empirical research and production. We aim to think widely across cultures and disciplines. We concentrate our work on the following clusters:
Future Ecologies
Underlying the discourses and debates about AI is the complex relation between nature and artifice. The Center for AI and Culture aims to conceptualize the ‘artificial’ by examining the multiple ways in which imitation, agency, co-creation and control shape its relation with the “natural.” Our investigation into the porous boundary between nature and technology involves experimental research on environmental histories and future ecologies, living materials and soft’ machines, water automata and thinking rocks. In this endeavor we pay special attention to the intense nexus of nature/artifice that is manifest in the rich and diverse aesthetic and intellectual traditions of the garden arts.
AI & Religion
Stories and myths of thinking machines have long recognized that artificial creation both evokes and troubles our deepest religious beliefs. Nevertheless, current discourse on AI is largely governed by unexamined humanist and secular perspectives. Our focus, in this cluster, is on contemplating the various ways AI, as both an applied technology and a speculative concept, intersects with the realms of religion, spirituality and the occult. Our explorations range from Neo-Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist metaphysics to monotheistic mystical theologies, techno-scientific exchanges of Jesuit missionaries to the magical practices and beliefs of electromagnetic engineers.
AI & Philosophy
The Center engages with a wide variety of philosophical schools. We are equally interested in Chinese, Indian,and Western (both Continental and Analytic) traditions. Our aim is to contribute to global discussions while also developing new and original approaches to questions of mind, consciousness, and intelligence as well as debates in artificial life, AI ethics, and theories of simulation.
AI & Intimacy
Notwithstanding the reputation of computer science as a ‘hard’ discipline, human-AI interactions in the sphere of digital culture have been surprisingly rich in the realm of soft interactions: emotions, attachments, and intimacies. Human-AI romantic relations have been at the forefront of popular digital culture. What role does desire play in the currently emerging AI-powered digital attention economy? What could be the long term consequences of human-machine relationships, and how are human and computer partners ‘personified’ or ‘objectified’ in different cultural contexts? The Center for AI and Culture studies the ways that AI companionship - with both the living and the dead - is profoundly altering the nature of our relationships.
Sentient Cities
In ‘smart city’ discourse and design, top down planning, centralized surveillance, logistical order and control tend to suppress the sensual, multiplicity of the urban atmosphere. Sentient cities, by contrast, emerge as a distributed, collective and embodied cognition with a rich spectrum of sensation and sensuality, aesthetics and affects. Our research recognizes that the city was sentient long before the development of computational technology. We pay special attention, therefore, to its hauntings, memories, and creative eruptions, which are, at once, timeless and ephemeral.
The Center’s ‘sentient city working group’ propose novel genealogies and inventive methodologies that do not use digital technologies simply to annotate, analyze or represent the urban environment. Instead, by attending to the complex ecology of diverse and symbiotic agencies—human, material, algorithmic, and biological—we aim to open new ways of conceptualizing, imagining, and intensifying the ever more immersive and increasing intelligence of the metropolis.
Truly Open AI
Despite the prominence of OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT—the field of Artificial Intelligence remains dominated by closed systems. Source codes and training algorithms are typically inaccessible, guarded by corporate secrecy, proprietary algorithms and regulatory gatekeeping. These barriers constrain what AI is—and what it might become. Our work engages with untrained models and open-source communities to explore feral, untamed and alternative trajectories for AI.
Cultivating Technodiversity
In every aspect of our work, the Center endeavors to make the most of its singular location as a Sino-American university located in Shanghai. This cluster will pay special attention to theorizing AI - its histories, philosophies, and speculative futures - outside the prevailing narratives, frameworks and assumptions that have emerged and spread out of Western Europe and North America and have come to dominate the discourse around AI.