We are delighted to have two interns joining us this summer.

Spencer Kaplan is a PhD Candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Yale University. He is currently writing an ethnography of AI researchers and engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing from time spent in an AI agents startup and an AI safety lab, his research asks how these technologists live and work with machines they have built but struggle to understand. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation. It is motivated by his experiences working at an AI Startup and, before that, consulting at investment banks and other companies. This summer he will be working on a project comparing how professionals in different fields are and are not choosing to use AI in their work.

Julien Porquet is an illustrator and PhD Candidate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He studies the semiotics and political economy of visual perception in contexts where technology increasingly mediates how people work and live with images. Drawing on fieldwork in the US illustration industry in the wake of the release of generative AI models, his doctoral research examines how people and machine look together and against each other at the same images, and how these interactions shape the value of creative labour. At SMC, he’ll work on the analogies between concepts of computational compression, legal expression, and artistic inspiration. 

We had an embarrassment of riches in our applicant pool and wish we could have hired at least a dozen interns.

Congratulations to Spencer and Julien, we are excited to work with you!