Thomas Mann House | 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. (PT)

Following an introduction to the theoretical concept of epistemic vulnerability by Julien Labarre (2024), leading scholars from the greater LA area and Thomas Mann fellows will dive deeper into the current development of generative AI and its impacts on democracy. Epistemic vulnerability posits that the quasi-exclusive focus on deception downplays the role of other epistemic problems, such as distrust in the media, and the widespread disorientation of citizens in reaction to low quality information and media outlets that they perceive as untrustworthy. Epistemic vulnerability is not the same everywhere and for everyone. Studies show that Northern European countries seem more resilient than the US or Eastern European countries. Workshop participants will take a close look at these resilience factors and what we can learn from them in transatlantic comparison. 

In two sessions, the workshop participants will discuss how AI can mitigate and deepen the effects of epistemic vulnerability, how the idea of ethical or responsible AI relates to this, and how scholars can study these developments empirically – in published texts, images and videos. This connects to problems of empirical research, such as data access and attacks on scholars in the field of disinformation studies.  

Workshop participation by invitation only.

Participants

Bruce Bimber is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC Santa Barbara, where he studies how democracy is affected by computing and media environments. He has written extensively about how the Internet facilitates the formation of political groups both within the mainstream and at the extremes. In recent years, he has turned to the study of democratic erosion, focusing on the role of social media use in people's belief in conspiracy theories and in the spread of populist and illiberal attitudes. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the International Communication Association, and a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is currently working on the use of AI to analyze conspiracy theories and endorsements of political violence in social media content. 

Claes H. de Vreese is Distinguished University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Society, with a special focus on media and democracy at the University of Amsterdam. He also holds the Chair in political communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research ASCoR. His research interests include the role of automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence in democratic processes. This includes microtargeting, news recommenders, social media platforms, disinformation, comparative journalism research, the effects of news, and public opinion. He has published a dozen books and more than 250 articles. He is the recipient of the Swanson Career Achievement Award, the NeFCA Career Award, and he is an elected Fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the International Communication Association, and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences. 

Ulrike Klinger is Professor for Digital Democracy and member of the Board of Directors of the European New School of Digital Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder. She is an associate researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, where she led the research group “News, Campaigns, and the Rationality of Public Discourse” until 2020. She researches digital political communication, technology and power, and the transformation of digital publics.

Julien Labarre is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at California State University Dominguez Hills and an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment, a research initiative launched at the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit. He is also the former administrator of the Center for Information Technology & Society. His research focuses on mass media, epistemic problems, extremism, and pathologies of democracy, primarily in the US and France.