Karen Hao on AI Colonialism at Syracuse University

Pulitzer Center grantee Karen Hao will visit Syracuse University on Monday, September 18, 2023 to speak with students about her experience as an award-winning journalist covering the impacts of artificial intelligence on society. While on campus, she will engage directly with students, speak to journalism classes, and participate in a public conversation, moderated by journalism innovations chair Dan Pacheco. 

Hao is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. She was formerly a foreign correspondent covering China’s technology industry for the The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review.

In her Pulitzer Center-supported reporting, AI Colonialism, Hao examines how colonial history influences which parts of the AI development pipeline happen in which countries. Silicon Valley may still be where most AI algorithms are developed—but the data those algorithms are trained on is being gathered in another country, labeled in a third, and used to develop models deployed in a fourth.