“Is Critical Infrastructure Studies of Big AI Possible? — The Critique of AI (II),” HASS Research Infrastructure in an Age of Artificial Intelligence workshop, HASS Digital Research Hub, Australian National University, 20 August 2026.
- Abstract: In this short keynote, Alan Liu revisits two key premises of critical infrastructure studies (CIS) that he has previously asserted. One is that “infrastructure,” as approached in CIS, carries on the edgy, critical function of “culture” in “cultural studies” from a half century ago. The second (in the introduction to Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities by Liu, Pawlicka-Deger, and Smithies) is that CIS extends the lineage of interpretive methods whose “objects of study” were ideas, language, culture, media, and identity—except that CIS’s object is a literal one, inviting both critical thinking and critical making. However, Liu asks: does today’s big AI—because of its scale, complexity, cost, intellectual-property issues, and other challenges—now stop CIS in its tracks? To do AI in order to critique AI, will CIS have to be satisfied with just “cultivating its garden” (in Voltaire’s phrase from Candide) by working with non-mainstream local, open-source, institutionally “walled,” or toy AIs? Or are there less proper, fastidious, and clean—but still acceptable—ways of doing/critiquing big AI?
