NNAI Livescu Projects
In the age of “deep learning”, we revisit foundational topics related to thinking: historical, philosophical, social, ethical and aesthetic research that either grounds or re-orients the public debates and questions around hot-button topics like AI, neuro-enhancement, or the ethical claims and questions associated with them. Our inquires are ongoing, multifaceted explorations designed to deepen our understanding through research, collaboration, and community engagement. Research proposals are developed through faculty feedback on our Faculty Seminars, and in collaboration with scholars at UCLA and beyond.
2025-2026
Prompt Hunters
NNAI Livescu, AIRES and SGUO are partnering to organize a social event at UCLA to test your generative prompt guessing and have insightful discussions about AI creativity and tech with other undergraduate students.
the Secret agent
NNAI Livescu and AIRES are partnering to organize a social event at UCLA to rise awareness on AI use at the university. Participants will be playing an interactive game inspired by “Is it cake?” where participants will be tested on their skill to identify AI material. Come share your perspective, connect with other students, and enjoy pizza while learning more about AI models use on campus!”
Winter 2026 Faculty Seminar
Faculty Seminars to discuss the latest research in AI, neuroscience, and sociology.
NNAI Livescu faculty seminars are designed by faculty around specific topics. We meet regularly over lunch to discuss a set of recommended literature pieces about a topic of interest.
Psychological Warfare, Psychiatric Violence, and the Prison Industrial Complex
We organized with Dr. Danielle Carr (UCLA) a workshop on Psychological Warfare, Psychiatric Violence, and the Prison Industrial Complex, as part of her research project: Material Intelligence as Historical Problem.
2024-2025
Ghostwriting: A Secret History of the No Bodies Who Write
A talk by Emily Hogdson Anderson, University of South California (USC).
What is ghostwriting? Understood broadly as the act of one person writing in another person’s name, the practice has—according to many ghostwriters—been around since written language itself. And yet the implementation, and acknowledgment, of this practice have varied greatly over time. Who are these invisible figures? Why do they do what they do? And why do they remain disembodied—behind the scenes?
THE no-body problem
Workshop organized with Sarah Kareem (UCLA), which gathers a group of scholars working broadly in eighteenth-century studies under the heading of what we are calling “The No-Body Problem,” the long history of thinking about the yields of—and yieldings to—disembodied media.
Confronting the Crises of AI Through Research
A series of seminars organized with Shazeda Ahmed (UCLA) around the applications of AI to both studying AI as an object of inquiry and discerning the inherent trade-offs in uses of machine learning in research.
Why Turing Was Wrong: Machines, Language and Citizenship
A talk by Joshua F. Dienstag, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The challenge that talking machines pose to traditional conceptions of the human is profound. If language activity is crucial to human status, then why should we not include talking machines in our community? What are our grounds for distinguishing computer-generated language from human language?
Natural Sociability & Political Association
We organized a two-day workshop with Peter Stacey (UCLA) on December 2024, on the history of human sociality. Entitled ‘Natural Sociability and Political Association: Grounding Contemporary Responses to AI in an Intellectual History of Human Sociality’. The aim of the workshop is to subject various parts of the conceptual framework which often underpins contemporary responses to this challenge to serious and sustained intellectual scrutiny. It will do so by digging deep into the intellectual history of a succession of theories about society and the state whose terms demonstrably continue to structure the terms in which we currently construe the problem.
Fall 2024 Faculty Seminar
Faculty Seminars to discuss the latest research in AI, neuroscience, and sociology. NNAI Livescu faculty seminars are designed by faculty around specific topics. We meet regularly over lunch to discuss a set of recommended literature pieces about a topic of interest.
Material Intelligence as Historical Problem
Workshop on September 2024 organized with Danielle Carr (UCLA) on the topic of midcentury brain science. Cross-fertilizing cultural, political, intellectual, and technical-scientific history, this workshop’s contributions ask: How did the midcentury brain sciences ramify across cultural and political discourses, and simultaneously, how did these discourses shape the technical affordances and practices of these brain sciences?
2023-2024
CAN HUMANS THINK? INAUGURAL NNAI LIVESCU EVENT
Inaugural talk by Matthew Jones and Chris Wiggins, authors of “How Data Happened”, titled Can Humans Think? Philosophy, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence, Humanities