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In the age of AI, what is the future of “public truths”? AI-driven tech platforms and companies, influencers, and deepfakes are issuing ever-new challenges for journalism, media integrity, and related mechanisms through which democratic societies hold power to account. At the same time, universities – erstwhile guardians of critical inquiry and independent knowledge production – are increasingly entering into partnerships with AI companies, in a new kind of knowledge compact. This panel brings together scholars of AI and influence in journalism, media, and California’s universities to address this technology’s increasingly powerful role in the current U.S. landscape of information and knowledge politics.
The panel will feature Maty Bohacek, Researcher at Stanford University; Martha Kenney, Professor of Women & Gender Studies at San Francisco State University; Martha Lincoln, Associate Professor of Anthropology at SF State; and Edward Wasserman, Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Cori Hayden, Director of Social Science Matrix, will moderate.
This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS), the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), the UC Berkeley School of Information, and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS).
Panelists
Maty Bohacek is a researcher at Stanford University, working at the intersection of AI and media integrity. In a world that is becoming increasingly AI-mediated, his goal is to build AI systems and networks that are inherently trustworthy and interpretable, resulting in productive, democratic discourse. Maty built a deepfake detector for President Zelenskyy of Ukraine and created a deepfake CNN news anchor, which opened a primetime news segment to raise awareness of AI threats. Beyond media integrity, he demonstrated that AI models trained on their own data collapse, developed a method to determine whether specific data were used to train a model, and developed an AI-powered sign language translator. His work has been featured in Forbes, CNN, Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and others.
Martha Kenney, Professor of Women & Gender Studies at San Francisco State University, is a feminist science and technology studies scholar and the co-founder of the Science, Technology, and Society Hub at SFSU. Her current work focuses on the politics of social media platforms and artificial intelligence products in education, medicine, and public health. Together with cultural anthropologist Martha Lincoln, she is currently working on the monograph, Marthas Against AI: Inside the Fight for the Future of Higher Education. She teaches classes in feminist science studies, critical AI studies, video game studies, and speculative fiction.
Martha Lincoln is a medical and cultural anthropologist. Prior to joining the Anthropology Department at SF State in 2017, she received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Prevention Research Center, affiliated with UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Broadly, her research addresses the cultural politics of public health, biopolitics, and the effects of political economic change on health systems and health outcomes. Since 2008, she has conducted field research in Vietnam, leading to published research on Hanoi’s informal sector, stratification and deregulation in health care provision, the ghosts of war, alcohol use and drinking cultures, the redefinition of poverty under late socialism, and urban cholera outbreaks. Her book, Epidemic Politics in Contemporary Vietnam: Public Health and the State, was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury Academic. She serves as co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies. Her current project is based in the United States, and focuses on affective economies in medical crowdfunding for cancer.
Edward Wasserman, Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley, served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism from 2013 to 2020. Before coming to Berkeley, he spent a decade as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, home of the nation’s first college-level journalism program. Wasserman’s journalism career spanned 30 years. He was CEO and editor in chief of American Lawyer Media’s Miami-based Daily Business Review newspaper chain, executive business editor of The Miami Herald, city editor of The Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune, and editorial director of Primedia’s 140-publication Media Central division in New York. Wasserman received a B.A. cum laude in politics and economics from Yale, a licence in philosophy from the University of Paris I, and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, where his thesis was on the politics of innovation in communications technology.
Cori Hayden‘s research and teaching focus on the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. She received her PhD in Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz in 2000 and has held fellowships at the Center for US-Mexican Studies in San Diego, the University of Cambridge, and the Center for Advanced Studies in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Palo Alto. At Berkeley, she has served as the Chair of the Department of Anthropology and was the Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society from 2010-2013. Hayden is the author of When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico (Princeton University Press, 2003), and The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and the Simipolitical in Mexico (2023, Duke University Press). Her more recent research and writing projects explore, respectively, the reanimation of crowd theory as an avenue for exploring contemporary market formations, political atmospheres, and modes of inquiry; and the sciences of Long Covid in a moment of resurgent authoritarianisms.
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