Sofie Vlaad

While a University affiliation comes with benefits, such as access to grants, funding, and networks, it also comes with a set of limitations, especially with respect to the construction of creative projects. Appeasing funding bodies, hitting target publication numbers, and meeting deadlines all run counter to the generation of art that is exploratory and horizontal in its approach. In this chapter the authors offer a mode of composition that prioritizes accessibility, community, and autonomy. Drawing on transfeminist philosophy, such as Talia Bettcher’s (2019) ground-bound approach and Eva Hayward’s (2008) notion of generative cuts, the authors present an autofictional retelling of the compositional strategies deployed in the construction of GLITTERPUNK, a mixed-media, multi-genre, collaborative arts project. During a period of grief and uncertainty, Sofie Vlaad and Steph Elms began to meet over Zoom to socialize and make art together. Drawing on personal experiences, shared affects, and free association, Vlaad and Elms began to experiment with long distance collaborative art making. The rules were simple: (1) we would prioritize accessibility, removing ourselves from static structures of deadlines and set meeting times to in order to prioritize our health and our artistic practice(s), (2) the work would always be collaborative, with ideas emerging through conversation and feedback on each other’s art, and (3) we would always let the art decide what it wanted to be, rather than trying to fit it into a given stylistic or generic box. A piece might begin with a phrase or a color motif. Using art supplies from the dollar store and DIY methods, Elms might produce an abstract collage. Concurrently, Vlaad might engage in free verse poetry composition highlighting metaphors or moments of the poem that resonated strongly. Elms and Vlaad might then share and edit each others’ pieces, bringing them into conversation. The results might look something like an experimental poem juxtaposed with a digitally remixed artwork to create a cohesive whole. Vlaad and Elms would then repeat the process. While GLITTERPUNK is an ongoing and ever evolving work of transfeminist composition, two artefacts have emerged from the collaboration thus far: a manuscript entitled GLITTERPUNK: The Legend of Cordelia Star, and a performance piece entitled GLITTERPUNK (REMIX). Drawing on concrete examples from the project, the authors reflect on these “Starfish Collaborations” and offer them as an alternative mode of composition both within and against the academy.

Contemporary AI systems are becoming increasingly integrated into scientific practices, from designing experiments to assisting with peer review. This paper argues that AI integration poses a threat to scientific objectivity. Feminist philosophers of science argue that diversity plays an important role in creating and maintaining scientific objectivity because diverse perspectives are better able to identify and evaluate background assumptions and values, meaning that any one individual perspective is less likely to have an outsized influence on scientific research. We argue that the integration of AI will reduce the number of opportunities for diverse perspectives to meaningfully contribute to scientific practices, and in doing so, make it more likely that background values will remain transparent and unquestioned. To show this, we consider a thought experiment where scientists increasingly offload their decisions onto a superhuman scientist who is both infinitely productive and generous with her time. We suggest that such a case would lead to the superhuman scientist’s idiosyncratic subjective preferences having an outsized influence on the field, even if she is doing perfectly good science. We then argue that the integration of AI into science is epistemically analogous by showing that AI systems have a perspective in at least a thin sense, meaning that their perspective can have an outsized influence on scientific research. Finally, we argue that empirical work on algorithmic monocultures and outcome homogenization shows that increasing the number of AI models involved in scientific practices does not solve the problem.

AI-generated art elicits two characteristic failures of aesthetic judgment: wholesale dismissal rooted in bias, and uncritical embrace that mistakes algorithmic fluency for creative vision. We argue that both are aesthetic vices: snobbery and naïveté. We propose discerning openness as the virtue that corrects them. We identify three loci of aesthetic value available to the virtuously open appreciator: the product, the human AI artist, and the AI (and its creators). Drawing on Matherne’s account of aesthetic flourishing, we argue that the capacity for such engagement is conducive to a flourishing aesthetic life in the AI era.

In this written dialogue, four trans philosophers remix and expand on a panel discussion held at the 2025 Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking Conference that explored the pressing issue of trans philosophy’s methods, building on an ongoing discussion in the literature. The panel and this text represent an extended and ongoing discussion between the authors. The authors are committed to neither methodological uniformity nor systematicity. Nevertheless, their embrace of pluralism leads to notable convergences regarding the basic sense that trans philosophy has a political dimension, the notion of philosophical rigor, and the need for reflexivity about trans philosophy’s methods.

With the increasing popularity of large language models, there has been an increase in the number of AI-generated literary works. In the absence of clear authors, and assuming such works have meaning, there lies a puzzle in determining who or what fixes the meaning of such texts. I give an overview of six leading theories for ascribing meaning to literary works. These are Extreme Actual Intentionalism, Modest Actual Intentionalism (1 and 2), Conventionalism, Actual Author Hypothetical Intentionalism, and Postulated Author Hypothetical Intentionalism. I argue that only Conventionalism and Postulated Author Hypothetical Intentionalism show any promise of adjudicating how we ought to ascribe meaning in the case of AI-generated texts, and further that Postulated Author Hypothetical Intentionalism is the stronger of the two views.

This article explores the question as to whether images generated by Artificial Intelligence such as DALL-E 2 can be considered artworks. After providing a brief primer on how technologies such as DALL-E 2 work in principle, I give an overview of three contemporary accounts of art and then show that there is at least one case where an AI-generated image meets the criteria for art membership under all three accounts. I suggest that our collective hesitancy to call AI-generated images art stems from the lack of a clear author figure. I propose two possible complementary solutions. First, that some AI-generated images as artworks are conjunctively authored by both the developers of the AI and the prompt-giver. Second, that AI image generators can themselves be considered works of art authored by the developers. I conclude by way of suggesting that we might have separate art competitions specifically for AI-generated artworks.

Diversity is often announced as a solution to ethical problems in artificial intelligence (AI), but what exactly is meant by diversity and how it can solve those problems is seldom spelled out. This lack of clarity is one hurdle to motivating diversity in AI. Another hurdle is that while the most common perceptions about what diversity is are too weak to do the work set out for them, stronger notions of diversity are often defended on normative grounds that fail to connect to the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. However, there is a long history of research in feminist philosophy of science and a recent body of work in social epistemology that taken together provide the foundation for a notion of diversity that is both strong enough to do the work demanded of it, and can be defended on epistemic grounds that connect with the values that are important to decision-makers in AI. We clarify and defend that notion here by introducing emergent expertise as a network phenomenon wherein groups of workers with expertise of different types can gain knowledge not available to any individual alone, as long as they have ways of communicating across types of expertise. We illustrate the connected epistemic and ethical benefits of designing technology with diverse groups of workers using the examples of an infamous racist soap dispenser, and the millimeter wave scanners used in US airport security.

This paper explores trans poetics as a way of doing trans philosophy. I begin by giving an overview of the current state of trans philosophy. I then give examples of other literatures wherein poetics is taken to be philosophically robust. After giving a brief history of trans poetics, I turn to the poetics statements and poetry of three trans poets—D'Lo, Ching-In Chen, and micha cárdenas—featured in the 2013 anthology Troubling the Line. I show how poetry is often uniquely able to capture the ambiguity of the WTF of trans experience in ways that differ from philosophical argumentation. I conclude by suggesting that poetics might move us away from a potential politics of suffering in trans philosophy to a politics of liberation.