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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
Black-and-white headshot of Martha Kenney

Martha Kenney - "Against AI Centrism: Resisting Generative AI in Higher Education"

Oct 28, 2026
Feminist Research Institute (or via Zoom, see link below)
Headshot photograph of Mona Sloane

Mona Sloane - "Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life"

Nov 19, 2026
STS Seminar Room, SSH 1246
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
Maxime Le Calvé

Maxime Le Calve - "Augural Anthropology: Staging Retrieval-Augmented Generative Conversations Beyond AI's Illusion of Scientific Understanding"

Apr 9, 2025
DataLab, Shields Library 360
Merve Tekgürler

Merve Tekgürler - "LLMs for Translation: Historical, Low-Resourced Languages and Contemporary AI Models" (Lecture and Workshop)

Mar 12, 2025
DataLab, 360 Shields Library
N/A

Conference - "Engineering Our Experimental AI Futures: Computational Social Science Escape 2025"

Feb 28, 2025
Stonegate Country Club, Davis
Holden Karau

Holden Karau - "Fighting Health Insurance Denials with AI: Using AI to Make the World Suck Less" (Lecture and Workshop)

Dec 3, 2024
DataLab, Shields Library 360
Ruxandra Teodorescu

Ruxandra Teodorescu - "Technological Bonds: Exploring Human-AI Interaction in Louisa Hall’s Speak"

Nov 4, 2024
STS Seminar Room, SSH 1246

More Events

Recent Publications

Young man faces towering white robot holding oversized yellow pencil in white studio

"Co-Writing with AI (Academic Style)"

  • by Joseph Dumit and Gerardo Con Diaz
  • November 17, 2026
Cyborg woman and supportive doctor in clinic

"Beyond Comfort: Interesting Experiences and the Measurement of Well-Being in AI Care Companions"

  • by Jack Jacobs, Alex Lau, Daezhon Gilbarg, Hanxuan Zhang, and Qiannan Li
  • September 14, 2026
Robot stealing books from a library

"Inappropriate AI"

  • by Colin Milburn and Rita Raley
  • December 10, 2025
White-and-black humanoid robot writing on paper at a classroom desk, other robots behind

“Teaching the Game while Leveling the Field: Pairing Peer Review with AI Feedback in a Business Writing Course”

  • by Marit MacArthur, Sophia Minnillo, Lisa Sperber, Nicholas Stillman, and Carl Whithaus
  • September 15, 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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