HumAIn Talks has presented a broad variety of speakers. We have heard Anne Helmond (Utrecht University) examine how Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are turning AI into a platform-based industry in her talk on "Big AI". Gabriele de Seta (University of Bergen) unpacked how "creativity" has become a discursive trap in debates on generative AI.
In October last year, researcher, artist, and filmmaker Eryk Salvaggio visited Oslo for a full day of events. He led the workshop "How to Read an AI Image" at Blindern before an audience filled Trekanten in the city centre for a live performance-lecture of his award-winning video essay Human Movie. The film contrasts the computational processes of diffusion models with the human metaphors we use to describe them. It is now freely available online, and we encourage everyone who missed the screening to watch it.
In November, Professor emeritus Charles Ess drew a line from Plato to large language models in his talk "Growing up stories for an AI-saturated era", followed by a conversation with Professor Steffen Krüger. The series continued this spring with digital ecologist Attila Márton, who argued that the ecological crisis is first and foremost a crisis in our ways of thinking. The Ecology of Ideas Podcast
This fall, the series continues with three new talks:
Lauren Goodlad opens the semester on October 16. Goodlad is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, chair of Critical AI @ Rutgers, and editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical AI.
On October 23, Andreas Hepp presents his work on pioneer communities. Hepp is Professor of Media and Communications and head of ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research, at the University of Bremen. His latest book examines the maker, hacker, and tech communities that have shaped our ideas of digital futures, with AI as their newest frontier.
Olga Goriunova closes the fall program on November 6 with a talk on ideal subjects. Goriunova is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her latest book, Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI (2025), explores how data and artificial intelligence abstract people into new kinds of subjects.
All talks take place in Eilert Sundts hus at Blindern and are open to everyone. More information about each talk will be published on our website.
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