Fenwick McKelvey on how AI is shaping our lives [video]

On Thursday, March 17, Fenwick McKelvey, an Associate Professor in Information and Communication Technology Policy at Concordia University, explored how AI is shaping our lives and communications. The talk is available for viewing here:

Blanket enthusiasm for AI obscures its social risks. AI works because it learns from training data often gathered by media systems repurposed for data surveillance. From facial recognition to vocal assistants and behavioural advertising, the framing of AI as revolutionary legitimates privacy encroachments and the expansion of surveillance sensors for training algorithms. AI simultaneously introduces new hazards due to the lack of transparency and explainability when these algorithms are deployed as forms of automated management. McKelvey’s talk critically interrogates how AI is proposed as a solution to media regulation across Canada’s media system.

Fenwick McKelvey is an Associate Professor in Information and Communication Technology Policy in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He studies digital politics and policy. He is the author of Internet Daemons: Digital Communications Possessed (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) winner of the 2019 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Award. He is co-author of The Permanent Campaign: New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang, 2012) with Greg Elmer and Ganaele Langlois.

This winter, the Atlantic Human Rights Centre, St. Thomas University’s Department of Human Rights, St. Thomas University’s Department of Journalism and Communications, the NB Media Co-op and RAVEN invite the public to the Human Rights & the Media Lecture Series. We will hear from scholars of the media and law, media makers and grassroots activists on how our media landscape is changing. We will hear about what they are doing to make this media landscape a more safe, just and equal space.

Upcoming lectures

Zoom link for lectures.

March 31 – Siti Maimunah, a rapporteur for the People’s Tribunal at COP26 in Glasgow, on telling the stories of people of the Global South affected by climate change.

April 12 – Kaitlyn Layden, a disability rights advocate, on engaging the media to advance the rights of people with disabilities.

For more information, contact Tracy Glynn at tglynn@stu.ca.