ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, KNOWLEDGE AND PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY IN THE AMERICAS: ETHICAL, EDUCATIONAL AND SOCIOCULTURAL CHALLENGES
The expansion of artificial intelligence in American societies poses challenges that transcend the technical and directly affect the ways in which knowledge is produced, validated, circulated and socially appropriated. Algorithmic systems now intervene in academic research, higher education, writing, information retrieval, cultural mediation, public communication and institutional decision-making. It is therefore necessary to critically examine how AI reconfigures the relationships among knowledge, power, memory, democracy and public responsibility in Latin America and the Americas.
This symposium proposes an interdisciplinary space for analyzing the ethical, educational, sociopolitical and cultural effects of artificial intelligence on knowledge processes. Its purpose is to bring together research that helps us understand how algorithmic technologies transform academic practices, educational institutions, forms of epistemic authority, criteria of public legitimacy, and the conditions of access, circulation and appropriation of information. The interest is not limited to the instrumental use of AI in support of teaching, research or communication: it seeks to interrogate the cultural, normative and political conditions under which these technologies are designed, implemented, regulated and adopted in contexts marked by historical inequalities, digital divides and disputes over knowledge.
Papers are welcome on generative AI and higher education; ethics of AI-assisted research; critical literacy and digital citizenship; algorithmic bias in the production and classification of information; transformations of academic and scientific authority; institutional governance of AI; human rights, privacy and data use in educational and research settings; disinformation, the public sphere and algorithmic mediation; and tensions between local knowledge, cultural memory, technological innovation and epistemic justice.
Within the horizon of the 59th International Congress of Americanists, the symposium engages with the axes of tradition and innovation and with reflection on the memories of the Americas. In culturally plural and profoundly unequal societies, artificial intelligence cannot be thought of solely as a tool of efficiency: it must also be examined as a technology that redistributes capacities for interpretation, classification, visibility and decision-making. The central question is not only what these systems can do, but what forms of knowledge, authority, citizenship and memory we are shaping by adopting them.
The symposium’s contribution will be to offer a critical, situated and constructive reading of the ethical and political challenges of AI in knowledge processes, with special attention to Latin American and comparative perspectives. It aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines, affiliations and regions interested in thinking about technological innovation through criteria of public responsibility, epistemic justice and democratic sustainability.
