How do we break something that is already broken?
Virtual Assembly of the Critical AI Network, 27-29 May 2026
Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London
Let us begin with our premise: AI is a broken technology. Despite the many hubristic claims made by its proprietary owners and amplified by the media, AI has no way to deliver on its promises to bring about societal benefits for all by increasing productivity, lowering costs, and accelerating innovation. Yet the rhetoric that surrounds AI’s incursions into our worlds of work and life has acted persuasively to cover for widespread precaritisation. Meanwhile, AI’s shoddy predictions and slop production further harm the marginalised and its immense resource demands hasten the destruction of the environment. Might we therefore not speculate that AI’s purpose is actually to break things by virtue of its very brokenness, not least any irksome movements towards racial, gender, class, or climate justice?
AI may not be the cause of our current polycrisis but it condenses the forces that brought them about, which it then amplifies, intensifies, and adds to. A critical approach to AI rejects the inevitability of this state of affairs. Instead, a critical approach recognises AI as merely the latest broken product of an already broken system, peddled under a techno-utopian guise in a desperate attempt to persuade us that energy-guzzling machine gods are our only hope out of our predicament. We therefore posit that the entangled dynamics of AI are useful diagrams of the economic, political, and ideological syndromes that lie beneath. AI’s stuttering operations dredge up misshapen philosophies, colonial dreams and a reactionary contempt for relations of care, and put them on full display. Our approach to AI asks how we break this brokenness. How can we who are forced to inhabit the dysfunction that AI names resist AI, recompose liveable lives from within the wreckage of computational nihilism, and craft its distortions into infrastructures for the common good?
Open Call for Participants: Critical AI Virtual Assembly
This assembly is an initiative of the Critical AI Network and our email list will be the main communication channel for it. If you are interested in taking part, either as a contributor or a participant, please sign up to the list here: https://jiscmail.ac.uk/CPCT-CRITICALAINETWORK.
The virtual assembly will take place online on 27, 28 and 29 May 2026 from 4-8pm (UK). For this inaugural event, we have identified three domains of inquiry to explore as a first step:
A. AI in Education, AI as Education — Wednesday, 27 May 2026
How has AI been insinuated into education, and in what ways has AI been taken for education itself, overtaking, eliminating, or usurping the civic and/or intellectual purposes of formal and informal learning? What are some of your case studies of local policy and examples of lived experience we might learn from? How might we formulate the most effective counterarguments – and organizing – against the integration of AI into our curricula and delivery that address local policy and financial conditions?
B. AI in and as Law, Governance, and Politics — Thursday, 28 May 2026
As AI creeps into normalised deployment in legal practice, policy articulation, and decision making in the guise of efficiency and accuracy, questions have yet to be posed about the impact on labour conditions and labour law, the status of evidence, the right to refuse, and the rights of those affected by AI-facilitated decisions, to name just a few. Moreover, the extent to which AI is being used to manipulate democratic elections via data harvesting, psychographic profiling, and micro-targeting, amongst other strategies, has raised seemingly unanswerable questions about the future of democracy. Indeed, is politics even possible in the age of AI? How might we set about articulating and answering some of these questions? How might we question the role of governance, whether of the state or of the institution, in mediating and facilitating the introduction of AI into all facets of our lives?
C. The Ecology of AI, AI and the Environment — Friday, 29 May 2026
Guided by the premise that under the hood, AI is simply the same technology whether it is being introduced into education or other domains of life, we ask how we might articulate and analyze the relations forged by AI between vastly different areas that hitherto appeared to be unconnected. What insights might be gained from situating AI within an ecology? How does AI compete with others in this ecology for natural resources, and what can be done to mitigate, contain, or reverse this impact? If, as we propose, AI should be evaluated not as a tool with a use value but rather as the latest symptom of misused infrastructures, how might we articulate the counterproductivity that AI adoption represents within its ecology for any green policy?
Our hope is to collect and publish a record of our discussions in a new blog we will be setting up for the network.
How do I participate?
Our working premise is that by virtue of having our data mined and colluding with the training of models with or without remuneration or consent, **we are all data workers in the age of AI**. Anyone who is a data worker in this sense is invited to participate.
There are three ways to be a part of this assembly:
(i) We invite you to contribute short (10 minute) position papers falling within one of the domains above. We welcome and value ‘non-academic’ contributions such as local case studies, reflections on personal experience, reports from activists, amongst others. We especially encourage submissions from underrepresented voices. In order to maximize accessibility, papers will be precirculated and panel speakers will present them briefly, followed by discussion. Papers have the option of being published on our blog.
(ii) We invite non-presenting attendees to consider participating as a note-taker at one of the sessions, with your notes published afterwards in a distilled and narrative form on our blog.
(iii) We invite you to attend any number of our panels as a discussant.
If you would like to be a part of the assembly, please fill out the form at https://forms.gle/McxCu65qz2ymBepS8 to send us:
- Your preferred mode of participation ((i) presenter; (ii) note-taker; (iii) discussant).
- If you selected (i) or (ii), please indicate which domain (A. AI in Education, AI as Education (27 May 2026); B. AI in and as Law, Governance, and Politics (28 May 2026); C. The Ecology of AI, AI and the Environment (29 May 2026)) you would like to either present or take notes in.
- If you selected (i), please include a max. 250w abstract of the paper you would like to present.
- Finally, for all participants, please include a brief 100w bio that includes your (academic or non-academic) institutional affiliation and position (e.g., student, professor, IT worker, curator, etc.).
The submission deadline is Friday, 20 March 2026 at 11:59pm.
How do I join the Critical AI network?
If you have received this CFP and are not already a member of our network, but would like to join and participate in the assembly, please subscribe to our mailing list at https://jiscmail.ac.uk/CPCT-CRITICALAINETWORK.
Who do I contact if I have questions?
If you have questions, feel free to get in touch with the organisers:
Dan Mcquillan (Computing) d.mcquillan [at] gold.ac.uk
Julia Ng (Literary Studies) j.ng [at] gold.ac.uk
Andres Saenz de Sicilia (Sociology) a.saenzdesicilia [at] gold.ac.uk
Deirdre Daly (CALL) d.daly [at] gold.ac.uk
Jenny Doussan (Visual Cultures) d.doussan [at] gold.ac.uk
Scott Wark (Visual Cultures) s.wark [at] gold.ac.uk
The Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths University of London 