Events
KEYNOTE BY KATE CRAWFORD: Model Collapse
5 May 2025
The Keynote lecture for Vienna Digital Cultures 2025 was delivered by Kate Crawford. Model Collapse: The Cascading Failures of Algorithms, Ecosystems, and Economies
The mass production of synthetic data is destabilizing AI models, creating a world of distorted outputs. Meanwhile, the infrastructure supporting the demands of generative AI is polluting our ecosystems and threatening economies—ushering in the era of AI slop. In this talk, Crawford explored the multiple collapses driven by planetary-scale AI.
Kate Crawford is an internationally leading scholar of AI and its impacts. She is a Professor at the University of Southern California in LA, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York, and the inaugural visiting chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She founded multiple research centers around the world, and leads the interdisciplinary lab called Knowing Machines. Her award-winning book, Atlas of AI, has been translated into twelve languages, won three international prizes, and was named a best book of the year by The Financial Times and New Scientist. She has advised policymakers in the White House, the European Parliament, and the UN, and is currently on the AI Council of President Sanchez of Spain. In addition to her scholarly work, Crawford is an artist whose works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and the Design Museum in London. Her most recent work, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500, won the European Commission's Grand Prize for work that spans the arts, science, and technology, and will be shown at the 2025 Venice Biennale. She was named in the inaugural TIME100 list of the most influential people in AI.