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Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures
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Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures

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The UC Davis Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures (CAIEF) promotes the democratic governance of AI systems by engaging diverse stakeholders in processes of creative worldmaking—crafting the world of tomorrow, together. The center takes an experimental humanities approach that combines fundamental research on the social dimensions of AI with forward-looking research on designing sociotechnical systems. CAIEF explores the cultural narratives and imagined futures that already shape decisions about AI and influence the course of its development. CAIEF also experiments with new AI systems and community-design methods to prototype democratic modes of AI governance and responsible innovation. CAIEF’s long-term vision underscores the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, democratic participation, and creative imagination in navigating the complex challenges and opportunities presented by AI technologies.

Upcoming Events

Martin Hilbert photo

Online Course - "AI Agents: From Prompts to Multi-Agent Systems" (Martin Hilbert)

Mar 17, 2025 - Jan 17, 2027
Coursera
More Events

Past Events

Gianluca Sergi

Gianluca Sergi - "Reframing AI and Its Implications for Cinema and Cultural Production"

Apr 20, 2026
STS Seminar Room, SSH 1246
Nanobots Invade Your TV

Stina Attebery, Josh Pearson, and David Higgins, "New Metaphors for AI" (Mini-Symposium)

Apr 1, 2026
STS Seminar Room, SSH 1246
Joan Slonczewski

Joan Slonczewski - “Biped Without Lanthanides: The Human Mind and the AI Person”

Feb 5, 2026
DataLab, Shields Library 360
Muhammad Ahmad

Muhammad Ahmad: "Doppelgängers: When AI Speaks for the Living, the Dead, and the Imagined"

Feb 4, 2026
DataLab, Shields Library 360
Kate Elswit

Kate Elswit - "Rethinking Motion Data for Dance Historical Inquiry and Interpretation"

Dec 1, 2025
STS Seminar Room, SSH 1246
AI Writing with Shakespeare

AI Writing Research Group Meetings

Nov 20, 2025 - May 21, 2026
STS Seminar Room, SSH 1246
AI Interprets the Thinker

Workshop - "How AI Thinks" (Carl Stahmer)

Nov 14, 2025
DataLab, Shields Library 360
Cyberpunk Laboratory

Nicholas Pilarski - "Dialectics of Civic Imagination: Four XR Experiments in Participatory Governance, Their Evolving Pipelines, and Lessons Learned at the Resilient Visions CoLab"

Oct 3, 2025
Sarah Bay-Cheng

Sarah Bay-Cheng - "Bad Actors: The Future Is Artificial"

May 16, 2025
DataLab, Shields Library 360
Dumit AI Workshop Slide

Workshop - "AI Large-Corpus Interface Imagining" (Maxime Le Calve and Joe Dumit)

Apr 11, 2025
STS Seminar Room, SSH 1246

Recent Publications

Robot stealing books from a library

"Inappropriate AI"

  • by Colin Milburn and Rita Raley
  • December 10, 2025
Shakespeare VR

"Modeling Conflict De-Escalation in Shakespeare through Hybrid NLP and Symbolic Approaches"

  • by Nicholas Treynor, Kyle Mitchell, Nick Toothman, Gina Bloom, Colin Milburn, Michael Neff, and Joshua McCoy
  • August 19, 2025
ArtBot_Classroom

“Large Language Models and the Problem of Rhetorical Debt"

  • by Marit MacArthur
  • June 25, 2025
Robot researcher in a high-tech laboratory

“Peer and AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR): A Human-Centered Approach to Formative Assessments"

  • by Lisa Sperber, Marit MacArthur, Sophia Minnillo, Nicholas Stillman, and Carl Whithaus
  • June 01, 2025
Rodin Robot Workshop

"Speculative Trainers: Large Language Models and Techniques of Affirmative Speculation"

  • by Aramo Álvarez, Mercedes Villalba, and Joseph Dumit
  • April 03, 2025
I, Robot Thinker

"AI Hallucinations Are a Feature of LLM Design, Not a Bug"

  • by Joseph Dumit and Andreas Roepstorff
  • March 04, 2025

The UC Davis Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures (CAIEF) is a NEH Humanities Research Center on Artificial Intelligence, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Award #: RAI-301512-25).

CAIEF logo created by Zamia Rose Sebastian Bailon (UC Davis Reprographics). Most AI-generated images on the CAIEF website were created using ArtBot and the AI Horde distributed cluster.

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