Story Forum Event: Tackling the Ethics of AI Through the Making of GHOST IN THE MACHINE: Part 1

Alix Dunn is a trusted expert and advisor who has worked at the intersection of technology and society for over 15 years. She is the founder and CEO of The Maybe, a critical consultancy, collective, and media studio that challenges the power and politics of tech. Alix is also the host of the weekly Computer Says Maybe podcast, a senior advisor to AI Now, and serves on the boards of the strategic litigation firm Foxglove and the radical research network RealML. Previously, she served as a trustee of the Ada Lovelace Institute for AI & Society. Alix and her team at The Maybe have partnered with organizations including the Ford Foundation, Amnesty International, Open Society Foundations, International Fund for Public Interest Media, System, Human Rights Watch, DeepMind, and many others.

Alli Finn is an experienced organizer, policy advocate, and movement researcher rooted in NYC, focused on AI, data centers, and state and corporate surveillance. Alli leads the AI Now Institute's partnerships work, equipping communities, organizers, and policymakers to challenge the negative impacts of AI infrastructure and systems on our work, health, rights, and daily lives. Alli also helps steward a nationwide network of local and state groups resisting data center expansion. 

Alli came to tech justice work through a decade of fighting for immigrant and worker rights, through deportation defense, frontline casework, and national advocacy. They led research and organizing against ICE surveillance with the Immigrant Defense Project and Surveillance Resistance Lab, campaigned against corporate tech power with Kairos, and managed the casework department at a migrant domestic workers’ center in Lebanon. Alli holds an M.A. in Sociology from the American University of Beirut and is currently a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest.

Johnathan Flowers is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His primary research areas include African American intellectual history and philosophy, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. Flowers also works in the areas of Feminist Philosophy and affect theory, with a specific focus on the affective organization of identity.

Outside of philosophy, Flowers works actively in the areas of Disability Studies, Science and Technology Studies and Comics Studies, where he applies insights from American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Race, and Disability Studies to current issues in human/computer interaction, artificial intelligence and machine learning, identity in digital space, and representations of identity in popular culture. 

Flowers is currently working to develop a poetics of experience through the work of Audre Lorde by treating her theory of the Erotic as an affective integrative principle which unites the self into a qualitative whole. Lorde's principle of the Erotic as integrative is what enables a unity of experience throughout the various aspects of Lorde's philosophy.

His first monograph, Mono no Aware and Gender as Affect in Japanese Aesthetics and American Pragmatism was published by Lexington Books in 2023. 

Thema (Tay-mah) Monroe-White is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. She is particularly concerned with understanding the pathways to achieving social and economic empowerment for minoritized groups via AI education, and emancipatory data science, a justice-centered approach to computational and quantitative inquiry that challenges algorithmic biases, advances racial equity, and reimagines how data and AI can serve marginalized communities. She investigates the intersections of bias mitigation, critical computational methods, and racial equity across science and technology education. 

Dr. Monroe-White has received multiple grants to study equity in K-20 learning ecosystems for the purpose of designing inclusive, data-driven pedagogies that broaden participation in AI and data science. She is an advisory board member and fellow of the Institute in Critical Quantitative and Mixed Methodologies (ICQCM), has served on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Technical Advisory Committee, and contributes regularly to national dialogues on equitable and emancipatory AI education through forums at the White House, the National Academies, and other convenings. Thema holds a PhD in Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from Howard University.

Dr. Tiera Tanksley is a Senior Researcher whose work examines the socioemotional, mental health and academic impacts of digital and artificially intelligent technologies on Black youth. Her work examines anti-Blackness as the “default setting” of schools and school-based technologies, including GenAI chatbots, facial recognition systems, weapons detection systems, and more. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist, and rewrite algorithmically biased technologies to produce more-just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora. 

In 2020, Dr. Tanksley founded the Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence summer program - a critical science and technology program that prepares young people to have more critical, agentic and algorithmically-conscious relationships with digital technologies that exist within and beyond the educational setting. In 2025, she was awarded an AI in Education research grant from the Spencer Foundation.

Hailing from London by way of New York by way of Seattle, Valere Veatch is an acclaimed independent documentary filmmaker. Veatch is a writer, director, and producer of documentaries "Me @ The Zoo" (HBO), "Love Child" (HBO). Veatch is a graduate of the New School for Social Research with a degree in Culture and Media Studies. Her award-winning work deals with the intersection of technology and society.