Mike Ananny — Making Generative AI into a Public Problem
USC professor Mike Ananny argues that treating AI as an abstract idea rather than concrete systems obscures the real stakes — and the real choices we still have.
Why we picked this
The AI conversation tends to swing between utopian and dystopian abstractions. Ananny pushes past both — asking what it would actually mean to govern these systems as shared public concerns rather than private ones.
Mike Ananny, a professor at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism and Communication, has spent years studying how algorithmic systems shape public life. In this lecture, he turns to generative AI with a provocation: we tend to discuss it as a phenomenon — something that is happening to us — rather than as a set of systems with specific designs, owners, and consequences that could be made differently.
The talk asks what it would take to reframe generative AI as a “public problem” — in the political science sense of an issue that requires collective deliberation and democratic accountability rather than purely private management by tech companies. That reframing, Ananny argues, is both harder and more possible than it looks.
Part of the UW Communication series on media and technology. Free and open to the public.