The Critical AI Seminar series continues in 2025 and 2026 with another four lectures that critically address Artificial Intelligence (AI) from various perspectives – across different contexts of application and through different lenses of critique. With these lectures we hope to once again bring together scholars from around the world in engaging discussions and further contribute to Critical AI Studies as a continuing ‘field in formation’ (Raley and Rhee, 2023).

The seminars are online, open to everyone. For each seminar, one or two prominent invited speaker(s) are invited to give a talk that engages theoretically or empirically with AI.

May 20, 12-1:30 PM (CEST): Invited talk by Thao Phan on ‘Testing-in-the-wild’

Registration here

This presentation analyses the phenomenon of the AI testbed and practices of “testing-in-the-wild.” It combines historical and sociological approaches to understand how places like Australia have come to be treated as ideal test sites for new AI systems, using commercial drone delivery company Wing Aviation as a case study. It connects the figuration of Australia as a contemporary testbed with histories of the nation as a colonial experiment. I argue that this historical frame has been consistently deployed to justify the treatment of lands and peoples as experimental subjects across a range of domains: techniques of penal management in the nineteenth century, military weapons in the early twentieth century, and AI-driven systems like drone delivery in the twenty-first century. By connecting this history to the present moment, I show how Australia has been variously treated as a test site and Australians as test subjects based on changing imaginaries of the nation and its people, from proxies for whiteness and Empire in the colonial period, to multiculturalism and ethnic diversity in the contemporary era.

Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a Lecturer in Sociology (STS) at the Research School for Social Sciences at the Australian National University (ANU). Thao has published on topics including whiteness and the aesthetics of AI, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research. She is an elected Council Member of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science, and is the co-founder and current President of AusSTS—Australia’s largest network of STS scholars.