Date: October 27, 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 12pm – 1pm
Venue: Room 901, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
Speaker: Karen Crawley (Senior Lecturer, Griffith University Law School)
Universities and academic publishers have met generative AI with the vocabulary they had: plagiarism, cheating, originality, responsible use. Having found originality unenforceable, they have installed transparency in its place, from student declarations to publishers’ permitted-use guidelines. These policies cannot describe what happens when reading, writing and thinking are conducted through machines whose every output is a hallucination. LLMs expose the proprietorial knowledge economy of the university, and offer in exchange only retreat: the scholarly subject evacuated into a sea of plagiarised text. Drawing on a law student’s declaration that using AI to summarise her readings ‘places more emphasis on my capabilities to critically analyse, rather than to critically comprehend’, the talk asks what it means to let machines write for us, and more gravely, what it means to let them read for us. Against all of it I make the case for friction, for the curiosity of a reader who comes to a text without already knowing what she wants from it, and for the ethical relation among readers that a shared text creates.
Dr Karen Crawley is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith Law School, where she teaches legal theory and research methods. Her research on issues of law and justice uses insights and methods derived from art and the humanities. She is the former Managing Editor of the Australian Feminist Law Journal (2013-2020) and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies (Routledge, 2024).
Chair: Shane Chalmers, Assistant Professor & Deputy Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=109406.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.