Machine Desires: Generative AI, Digital Extractivism, and Feminist Politics of Care
The Humanities in the AI Future Symposium
Date: Friday, April 52024
Time: 1:30-2:30 pm
Location: Busch Hall, Room 18 (basement level)
Mitali Thakor: Assistant Professor of Science in Society, Wesleyan University
Machine Desires: Generative AI, Digital Extractivism, and Feminist Politics of Care
This talk situates concerns about the rise of generative AI and data capitalism in the context of feminist politics of privacy and care. Building upon scholarship critically examining the racial dimensions of digital labor, microwork, and outsourcing more broadly, I consider questions of consent, harm, and desire brought about by the extractivism of generative AI: What form does consensual data extraction take, and what new social contracts does it bring into emergence? What violences continue to be enacted to present the illusion of seamless, “artificial” intelligence-driven labor? And finally, what sorts of care practices and intimacies might be recuperated from desires for digital labor?