A Talk by Dr David Simon
30 July @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
17:30 for 18:00
The rise of AI-generated and enhanced mass violence materials – often (mis)using recorded testimonies that are central to historical memory and social repair – presents a crisis for mass atrocity memory. While AI could revolutionise the field of memorialisation, it also risks amplifying distorted and denialist views, while weakening acceptance of historically accurate depictions and analysis.
In this presentation, Dr. Simon will summarise both the promise of AI technology, as well as a selection of the harms – both immediate and systemic – that might arise from the careless or unethical use of AI in connection with mass atrocity testimonies. He will address some of the possibilities for technological, legal, and institutional responses to these challenges, arguing that collective action involving all three prongs is needed.
About the speaker
Dr. David J. Simon is a Senior Lecturer and the Assistant Dean for Graduate Education at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University, where he directs the Genocide Studies Program and the Mass Atrocities in the Digital Era initiative, and co-directs Yale’s Human Rights Studies certificate programme. His research focuses on atrocity prevention and the politics of recovery from mass atrocities.
He is the co-editor of Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age: Memorialization Unmoored (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, with Eve M. Zucker) and The Handbook of Genocide Studies (Edward Elgar, 2023, with Leora Kahn). With Dr. Kahn he created the exhibition Speaking Up: Confronting Hate Speech, which has shown in Houston and New York, and he is a founding member of the Digital Archive of the Memorialization of Mass Atrocities (DAMMA) working group.
Dr. Simon sits on the board of advisors of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab, chairs the board of the Reckoning Project, and serves on the advisory board of the Bosnia-based Post-Conflict Research Center. He is a graduate of Princeton University and holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles.