Distinguished Lecture: Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her research on digital media. She is author many books, including: Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (2021, MIT Press). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and International Fellow of the British Academy.

When the humanities and AI are usually brought together, it is under the rubric of “ethical AI,” in which ethics is outsourced to the humanities. To move away from this increasingly bankrupt and problematic formulation and to help build a relationship based on the similarities between these two areas, this talk explores how fundamental concepts and axioms within critical theory and natural language processing intersect: from the notion that value stems from difference to the mapping of latent and manifest spaces. By moving from these similarities – not differences – we can begin to understand the limitations of existing generative AI models and why their insights seem to offer critical theorists, deja vu.

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