Princeton's Meredith Martin Co-Organized First-Ever ICML Workshop on Culture and AI
2 September 2026
Workshop led by Princeton, the Alan Turing Institute, Google DeepMind, and Cornell brings together scholars to discuss the humanities' role in shaping AI
Meredith Martin (center) and ICML conference speakers in Seoul, South Korea, July 2026.
Meredith Martin, Professor of English and Director for Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, was a co-organizer of the inaugural "Culture × AI: Evaluating AI as a Cultural Technology," a workshop held at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) on Friday, July 10, 2026, in Seoul, South Korea.
The ICML is the leading annual conference for machine learning research, publishing foundational work underlying much of modern AI research. This year, ICML’s workshop program was particularly selective: “Culture × AI” was one of only 44 workshops chosen out of 247 proposals, and marks the first time ICML has hosted a workshop dedicated to this topic.
"Culture × AI" examines how generative AI systems function as cultural technologies — producing text, images, and video shaped by vast amounts of social and cultural data — and asks how the humanities, arts, and qualitative social sciences can inform AI development from the outset, rather than being applied only after deployment to mitigate harm. The workshop's central theme, "Interpretive Technologies," explored how humanistic traditions of meaning-making and contextual and aesthetic judgment can be built into AI design.
Speakers included prominent voices in Cultural AI: Lauren Klein (Emory University), Ted Underwood (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Maria Antoniak (University of Colorado, Boulder), and Joel Z. Leibo (Google DeepMind), along with a panel discussion, a lightning talk session featuring accepted papers from researchers at McGill University, KAIST, Duke University, and the University of Groningen, and a closing poster session.
Martin's involvement reflects Princeton's growing engagement with the intersection of the humanities and artificial intelligence, extending the work of the university's Center for Digital Humanities into international, cross-institutional conversations about how cultural knowledge can shape the future of AI systems.
More information about the workshop is available at doingaidifferently.org/culturexaiworkshop.