School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Planetary AI project investigates the production networks of AI. In particular, it examines often-invisible material infrastructures and human labour that sustain artificial intelligence (AI). 

While AI is frequently imagined as automated and immaterial, the Planetary AI project examines two interconnected dimensions: 

1. Human labour involved in producing datasets for AI training, evaluation, and fine-tuning that supports and sustains machine learning systems; 
2. The materiality of AI, including the expanding networks of resource extraction and the rapid growth of data centre infrastructures that underpin computational systems.

Project activities include: 

• Extended field work in Brazil, Colombia, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa and India in 2026 and 2027. 
• Scholarly outputs and media publications engaging a variety of case studies and stakeholders.  
• Multi-stakeholder engagement in the form of joint event participations, expert-panel roundtables, and multimedia outputs. 
• Reading group ‘Critical<>Prompts!’, which has online sessions fortnightly; 
• Monthly online seminar series with invited scholars and activists, covering wide-ranging issues connecting materiality, public values, accountability, governance, resistance, civic engagement, and decoloniality. 
• Annual keynote lectures titled ‘AI Futures’, inviting leading thinkers in the field to engage in conversations on developing visions for radically different futures. 

This is funded by UKRI.