Tuesday
What is Machine Learning?
“LLMs are not search engines looking up facts; they are pattern-spotting engines that guess the next best option in a sequence.”
Financial Times, “Generative AI Exists Because of the Transformer”
Madhumita Murgia, “Generative AI Exists Because of the Transformer,” Financial Times, September 12, 2023, https://ig.ft.com/generative-ai/.
Burkhardt, Sarah, and Bernhard Rieder. “Foundation Models Are Platform Models: Prompting and the Political Economy of AI.” Big Data & Society 11, no. 2 (2024): 20539517241247839.
Take the group formation quiz
Additional Materials
Cedric Sam et al., “A Guide to the Circular Deals Underpinning the AI Boom,” Bloomberg Technology, March 11, 2026. (This is a gift link but unfortunately you have to enter your email address to proceed.)
Hendrix, Justin. “Is an Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence Possible?” Tech Policy Press, March 23, 2025. https://techpolicy.press/is-an-antifascist-approach-to-artificial-intelligence-possible.
Diyar Saraçoglu, “Thaura.Ai: An AI Model against Big Tech Domination,” Bianet, December 26, 2025, https://bianet.org/haber/thaura-ai-an-ai-model-against-big-tech-domination-314891.
Today’s activities
Thursday
The Politics of ML
“What is at stake for politics itself to be rendered a problem of the design of a
Louise Amoore, Machine Learning Political Orders
model, when every political problem is arranged as a machine learning problem?”
Louise Amoore, “Machine Learning Political Orders,” Review of
International Studies 49, no. 1 (2023): 20–36.
Yeshimabeit Milner and Amy Traub, Data Capitalism and Algorithmic Racism (Demos, 2021), https://www.demos.org/research/data-capitalism-and-algorithmic-racism.
Today’s activities
Annotation bank (for solo annotation assignment)