Mining Interiority: Generative AI and Infrastructures of Extraction
A Public Lecture by Visiting Scholar David Gaertner
Presented by Woodsworth College
About the Talk:
Platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are often framed as tools for producing text, images, or code. David Gaertner argues that this framing obscures a deeper transformation: generative AI is becoming infrastructure—systems that reorganize knowledge production and circulation.
Drawing on Indigenous critiques of colonial extraction and analyses of late capitalism, he examines how contemporary AI systems capture and model traces of human interiority. Language, attention, curiosity, and affect become raw material for machine learning systems built to scale.
Rather than approaching generative AI from a position of distance or refusal, he begins from his own experience of thinking and writing within these systems as a neurodivergent literary scholar. From that position of proximity, he examines a central paradox: the same infrastructure that helps us think and write more fluidly also depends on the continual extraction of human expression to sustain its growth.
Accessibility & Logistics:
- Format: In-person.
- No registration required.
- Audience: All students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the public are welcome.
- Contact: For accessibility accommodations or general inquiries, please contact Dr. Jon Johnson at jon.johnson@utoronto.ca.
- Refreshments provided.
David Gaertner
David Gaertner is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and an Associate Member of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia. His scholarship examines Indigenous literatures, digital media, and the cultural and political implications of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, with particular attention to how digital and computational infrastructures intersect with longer histories of colonial extraction and Indigenous resistance.
He is the author of The Theatre of Regret: Art, Literature, and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada and the editor of Soykeyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe. He is also co-editor of Indigenous X: Networks of Relations and Resistance on and Beyond Native Twitter, forthcoming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press.