I am Troubled (Bob L. T. Sturm)

At the conclusion of my ERC-funded project “MUSAiC: Music at the Frontiers of Artificial Creativity and Criticism”, I find that I am troubled. First, I am troubled by the collision of what I think I know about the engineering of large language models with how I see them being used, sold and valued. Something, I think, is deeply wrong here. Second, I am troubled by contradictions in my a/r/tography praxis — that is, being an artist, researcher and teacher in private and professional worlds increasingly inflected and infected by AI and AI-speak. These contradictions center on my creative and pedagogic practices, personal beliefs in intellectual property and individual liberty, and moral judgements about training AI systems on the world's data, and neoliberalism more broadly. My talk will focus, of course, on just how troubled I am, and my current thinking about it all. https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2026/i-am-troubled Co-sponsored by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and the School of Information The Cultural Analytics Series is a series of lunchtime talks and workshops highlighting research that focuses on the data-driven analysis of cultural phenomena.