with Matteo Pasquinelli (Ca’ Foscari University Venice), Anna-Verena Nosthoff (Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg), Roland Meyer (University of Zurich & Zurich University of the Arts), Rainer Mühlhoff (University of Osnabrück), moderated by Jacob Blumenfeld (HU Berlin)
Topic
This roundtable invites a critical conversation about AI as a social and cultural phenomenon, one that cannot be separated from the economic, political, and ecological conditions that produced it. We will discuss how large language models, image generators, prediction tools, and algorithmic systems are not only changing how we work and communicate, but contributing to a slow degradation of literacy, public reasoning, and shared meaning. AI does not simply process culture, it shapes it, standardizes it, and feeds it back to us in increasingly uniform, predictable, and market-driven forms.
Criticisms of AI are legion, but they seem to have not slowed down its triumph one bit over our lives. Every app, every device and every tool is now “augmented“ by AI, making it nearly impossible to do anything without inadvertently contributing to our own obsolescence. Even writing this event description required blocking numerous AI tools from constantly trying to insert themselves in the middle of every sentence, like an annoying uncle at a holiday party.
The discussion will take a critical look at the ways AI currently corrodes the basic practices of thinking: the flattening of language in ChatGPT-style prose, the replacement of visual imagination with automated templates, and the erosion of deep reading, writing, and interpretation in favor of fast and frictionless output. Such transformations point beyond technology itself. They reveal a society already accustomed to speed, convenience, and outsourcing judgment, where thinking is a burden, creativity deskilled, and public culture reduced to algorithmic residue. This roundtable asks how we might still cultivate critical reflection, honest dialogue, and literacy skills in a moment when the tools we use to think are making thinking nearly impossible.
Speakers
Matteo Pasquinelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice where he is coordinating the ERC project AIMODELS. His book The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (London: Verso, 2023) won the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2024.
Anna-Verena Nosthoff is a junior professor of ethics of digitalization at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and co-director of the Critical Data Lab (Humboldt University/University of Oldenburg). She is the author of Kybernetik und Kritik: Eine Theorie digitaler Regierungskunst, out with Suhrkamp in February 2026.
Roland Meyer has been DIZH Bridge Professor for Digital Cultures and Arts at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since July 2024. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre «Virtual Lifeworlds» at the Ruhr University Bochum, where he worked on virtual image archives. Roland Meyer’s work as a media and visual culture researcher focuses on networked image cultures. He is particularly interested in the new aesthetic and operational functions of digital images under the conditions of global digital platforms, ubiquitous computing, mobile media and big visual data.
Rainer Mühlhoff is Professor of Ethics of Artificial Intelligence at the Institute of Cognitive Science and the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Osnabrück. From October 2025 to March 2026, he will also be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. He is additionally affiliated as a researcher with the Einstein Center Digital Future in Berlin and as an associate member of the Collaborative Research Center 1171 Affective Societies at the Free University of Berlin.