Meet Kate Crawford: the researcher using art to demystify AI

Professor Kate Crawford is a world-leading scholar in artificial intelligence, who has built a career studying the social and political implications of AI – while also breaking new ground in creative approaches to the subject.

In her upcoming lecture, Crawford will map out the current landscape and future possibilities of AI, illuminating what’s at stake for people and planet, and what must be done to lay the foundation for a more responsible and equitable approach to AI development.

Book your tickets here and get to know more about her life and work below.

She is a veteran in the field

While AI might seem like a recent innovation, Crawford has been studying big data, algorithms and machine learning for over 20 years.

Her work focuses on ‘opening the black box of AI’, not only to expose the biases, assumptions, errors, and ideological positions within AI technologies, but also the complex chains of labour and production which underpin them:

‘This means looking at the natural resources that drive it, the energy that it consumes, the hidden labour all along the supply chain, and the vast amounts of data that are extracted from every platform and device that we use every day,’ she has said.

Her art has been shown at MOMA in New York, London’s V&A and Fondazione Prada in Milan

As well as her scholarly and journalistic outputs, Crawford uses artistic data visualisation to communicate the invisible systems and processes that power AI.

Her work is now part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has been shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and Fondazione Prada in Milan.

Her artistic outputs include Anatomy of an AI System, created with fellow artist and researcher Vladan Joler, which explores the life cycle of an Amazon Echo smart speaker; Training Humans, in collaboration with artist and photographer Trevor Paglen, which examines how images are used to train AI systems; and Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025, which maps over 500 years of how communication and computation are intertwined with systems of power and control – from the Gutenberg printing press right through to large language learning models.

Crawford has explained that she uses art as part of her research output because discussions about AI are too important to keep within a rarefied academic context: ‘Given the enormous social and political impact, this has to be a set of issues and questions that are as public as possible,’ she has said.

She was a founding member of the feminist collective Deep Lab

Formed in 2014, this cyber-feminist collective comprised a diverse group of researchers, artists, writers, engineers, and cultural producers. Their work, which spanned lectures, publications, contemporary art, public programming and performances, aimed to combat discrimination towards marginalised people at the hands of ‘corporate dominance, data mining, government surveillance, and a male-dominated tech field.’

She is an ARIA-nominated musician

Crawford has been involved in several musical projects over the years, including the electronic duo B(if)tek in the 1990s and a long-running musical collaboration with Bo Daley called Metric Systems. B(if)tek’s single ‘Bedrock’ was nominated for Best Dance Release in the 1999 ARIA Awards (but lost to Josh Abrahams’ ‘Sweet Distorted Holiday’).

As an electronic musician, Crawford sees a synergy between her music and her research interests, describing it as a ‘fantastic combination of bringing together creative practice with a set of much larger concerns’.

She was recognised by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people in AI

Alongside people like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI founder Elon Musk, Crawford was named by TIME magazine as one of the world’s most influential people in AI in 2023. The magazine’s editors selected her as a noteworthy thinker in the field who is grappling with ‘profound ethical questions around the uses of AI’.

About the For Future Reference lecture series

Endowed by the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust, For Future Reference is an annual lecture series that shines a light on women’s influence on society via the mediums of literature, storytelling and authorship, both historically and into the future, with a focus on the future archives to be held in the State Collection.

This series is supported by the Library’s Women Writers Fund initiative, which seeks to redress the historical gender imbalance in our collection by acquiring works and presenting public programs that highlight work by under-represented women writers, artists and thinkers.

Photo credit: Stephen Oxenbury