Sociology Seminar 
Time: :12:15 pm – 13:30 pm

Date: 13 th of march
Room : 3049

Bernie HOGAN (University of Oxford) – ” The Social Implications of Autoencoding “

Abstract : 

Humans, like many animals, are exceptional at detecting and matching patterns in their environment. What makes us distinct, however, is our ability to externalize and encode the world through language and technology. For centuries, technology has been understood as a process of encoding—a deliberate act of representation and storage. Yet, modern machine learning operates differently : it does not simply encode but autoencodes, discovering patterns in data without symbolic mediation.

To understand the social implications of machine learning, we must move beyond hallucination discourse and low-level “gotchas” toward a deeper epistemic provocation: autoencoding does not merely extend encoding—it renders encoding epistemically secondary, unsettling our very assumptions about how knowledge is structured.

Drawing from research with language models and visual AI, including work with my colleagues on qualitative studies on participant-aided deepfakes, I propose a novel framework for the social implications of AI. By foregrounding its abductive reasoning—its ability to infer from the most probable explanation—I argue that autoencoding forces us to rethink not just AI,  but the epistemic scaffolding that has long defined our relationship to technology. The real social implication is a fundamental shift in what can be made legible—to institutions, to peers, and to the systems that govern meaning itself.

Organizers:
Paola TUBARO (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Sofian EL ATIFI (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Patrick PRÄG (Pôle sociologie CREST)

Sponsors:
CREST