Innovative Storytelling for Social Impact
and Culture Change

Ghosts in the Machine: Reanimating Anthropological Engagement with AI

Artificial intelligence is haunted-by its past imaginaries, by the politics of its present, and by the futures it promises or threatens to deliver. Anthropology, too, is haunted: by disciplinary forebears, by uneven histories of engagement with technology, and by a legacy of critique that, while essential, is not sufficient. This roundtable calls for a renewed, more balanced anthropological approach to AI-one that reanimates the spirit of earlier ethnographic and theoretical engagements from the 1980s and 1990s, before the long silence that followed. Between 2000 and 2018, anthropological scholarship on AI was sparse and often shaped by critical distance-important but limited in its reach. Since 2018, we see signs of reawakening: a cautious return to the field, accompanied by methodological and ethical innovation. Yet the discipline still tends to linger in the shadows, watching but not always intervening. If we are to shape more just and humane AI futures, we must step beyond armchair critique and into active, public, and participatory engagement. This panel takes seriously the 2025 AAA meeting theme of Ghosts to interrogate how past anthropological engagements-and absences-continue to structure the field's current relationship with AI. We ask: What have we forgotten or refused? What insights from past ethnographies of computation, cognition, and automation might guide us today? And how might anthropology become a more generative presence in contemporary AI development, rather than a ghost at the margins? We aim to foreground a diversity of perspectives, including those of critics, designers, researchers, and educators, to explore how anthropology might both exorcise and embrace its ghosts in the machine. In doing so, we seek not only to critique AI, but to craft new ways of engaging it-ethically, ethnographically, and with an eye toward shaping the future.