In the current rapidly unfolding AI race, much discussion centers on the concrete technologies, such as ChatGPT, DALL-E or Bard. In this event in Amsterdam we want to turn the focus towards the infrastructures that enable and/or constrain these emerging AI technologies and their use in the media sector. In taking this focus, we follow recent scholarly work in both infrastructure studies and platform studies (see Plantin et al., 2016) that has addressed the new epistemological challenges that a highly digitized media environment has produced. 

These studies have turned towards the exploration of the sociotechnical systems and distributional systems that enable digital technologies to function and how these are embedded in broader social structures and power relations, such as gender, race, class, and geopolitics. They have also explored questions of platform power and how these can be studied via changes in market structures, new forms of governance and by investigating how platform infrastructures enable wider transformations in how new software is developed or deployed (see e.g., Nieborg and Poell, 2018). 

While taking a deep dive into the emerging questions of AI Infrastructures, we take a broad understanding of infrastructures and invite papers that engage with questions relating to different forms of enabling and constraining infrastructures of AI. More concretely, we invite papers that address questions relating but not limited to:

• Computing infrastructures (e.g., models and cloud services)
• Data infrastructures (e.g., data sets, labeling practices)
• Funding infrastructures (e.g., business logics, funding programmes or partnerships)
• Educational infrastructures (e.g.. AI trainings for journalists)
• Platform infrastructures (e.g., questions of concentration or interoperability)
• Legal infrastructures (e.g., emerging legislation, soft and self regulation guidelines)

The hope is that by the end of the mini-conference we will address the question of infrastructures from a variety of angles and methodologies to better understand how to research infrastructures and their relations to each other as well as the implications for media and democracy.