“Automating Away Queer Knowledge: AI and the Ethos of Instrumental Knowledge” by Dr Daniella Gáti

We are delighted to invite you to a thought-provoking talk on “Automating Away Queer Knowledge: AI and the Ethos of Instrumental Knowledge” by Dr Daniella Gáti, a respected Lecturer in Games & Interactive Media at The University of Salford.

Event Details:
Title: Automating Away Queer Knowledge: AI and the Ethos of Instrumental Knowledge
Speaker: Dr Daniella Gáti, Lecturer in Games & Interactive Media, The University of Salford
Moderator: Prof TANG Tse Shang Denise, Head & Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University 

Date: 14 Apr 2025 (Mon)
Time: 11:00 – 12:30pm
Venue: LCH118 (in-person only)
ILP : 1.5 units in Intellectual and Entrepreneurship Development (pending)

Should you have any questions, feel free to contact Department of Cultural Studies ([email protected] or 2616 7469).

We look forward to your active participation in this stimulating event.

All are welcome! 

Abstract:
Queerness as an ethical stance draws from a utopian vision founded on precarity, uncertainty, experimentation, and failure; it understands humanity as vulnerable and limited, but draws from these limits an ethos of play, possibility, mutuality, and care. On the contrary, AI algorithms are founded on an ethos domination and control, so that their development and use results in a performative enactments of knowledge as power. This paper examines generative and recommendation algorithms to argue that the architecture of their code embodies an ideology of certainty, absolute knowledge, and mastery and that, as a result, the expansion of these algorithms into ever larger segments of everyday life represents a paradigm shift in how we understand knowledge. Moving from the queer notion of precarity, uncertainty, and epistemological humbleness that so much queer theoretical work has sought to forward, contemporary AI algorithms are increasingly pushing us toward an extractive, instrumental vision of knowledge for which machinic mastery as an end goal justifies any instrumental method, even if it sidelines or even erases some humans, or the notion of humanity as such.

Biography:
Daniella Gáti (he/she/they) is lecturer in Creative Computing at the University of Salford. Their work examines digital cultures in a transnational context, paying special attention to how algorithmic architectures shape social formations, discourses, and identities. They are currently working on a book project entitled A Queer Theory of AI and Algorithmic Knowledge, which examines how artificial intelligence algorithms reshape how we create knowledge and what we understand as knowledge, and criticizes AI’s epistemological project from a queer theoretical point of view. Daniella is also a member of the international research group “Transdisciplinary Queer AI Futures.” Daniella’s writings have appeared in Critical Quarterly, Journal of Narrative Theory, Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, Information and Culture, among others.