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Autumn Lecture Series

The second part of the SCRIPTS Forum Lecture Series will take place from October to November 2026. In another series of online talks with an extraordinary range of scholars, we will delve deeper into the relationship between artificial intelligence and accountability, propaganda, surveillance, and governance across liberal and authoritarian systems. Together, we will investigate a wide range of topics, from AI-generated kittens as synthetic propaganda and political values in LLMs to questions of who drives the discourse of AI as inevitable and states outsourcing repression. 

Made in China vs. Made in America: Do Large Language Models Differ in Governance Values?

AI is not neutral. So what happens when Large Language Models from the US or China, both designed in opaque processes under a lack of accountability, end up with distinct political values and are deployed in different contexts? What values do they carry with them? This talk discusses early results on what answers different models give – or whether they are just guessing.

Transpacific Utilitarianism: The Political Projects of AI Value Alignment in China and the United States

Shazeda Ahmed (UCLA), examines how the concept of AI alignment is shaped by competing political agendas in China and the US — and whose values ultimately get built into these systems.

It Feels Harmless: Synthetic Propaganda and the Postdigital Condition

What begins with cute AI-generated kittens can quickly turn into far-right edits on the For You Page. This talk shows how synthetic propaganda uses slop as a vehicle and thereby disorders discourse. But what if authoritarian states and liberal governments are increasingly using the same visual grammar and propaganda becomes a condition of the platform environment?

Outsourcing Surveillance: Online Public Management in China

The digital age has provided autocrats with many more technologies to control, co-opt, and repress dissent. But how do they safeguard the capacity to coordinate all these technologies? This talk dives into the question of how the Chinese state has outsourced surveillance and how this is supposed to augment and fine-tune digital repression.

The Discursive Order of AI: Racing from Myths to AI Governance

AI did not simply become the object of fundamental controversy that it is today. It was brought into being by powerful discourses. This talk asks the pressing question of who drives this process and reconstructs the performative politics of AI. How do these discourses materialise not only in AI governance but in our understanding of AI?

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