The Digital Decides: How Algorithms and AI Shape What We Know – Birkbeck’s BA Arts and Humanities

Touching upon Year 1’s ‘Introduction to Digital Culture’, this engaging session with Professor Scott Rodgers and Dr Robert Topinka explores how algorithms and AI shape what you see online, who builds them, and whose interests they reflect. Learn how bias can emerge in systems like large language models and how to spot these hidden influences yourself. 

Behind every search result, recommendation, and news feed is a set of decisions made not by humans, but by algorithms and AI systems. This session draws on cutting-edge media research to ask: how do these systems work, who built them and whose interests do they serve? We'll look at how large language models are trained, why machine learning can encode racism without anyone intending it to, and how you can start to see the invisible forces shaping your online world. Includes a short practical exercise followed by a campus tour of Birkbeck. 

This taster course is open to students in Year 11 (GCSE or equivalent year), Year 12 and Year 13 (final year A Level/IB students) and anyone who is thinking of starting their undergraduate studies in September 2026 or September 2027. 
 

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