Bennington Center for Artificial Intelligence

Serious thinking about AI, from a campus that isn't afraid to engage with difficult questions.

AI arrived on campus without asking. This is where the college works out a response: grounded in the liberal arts, in public, and together.

See events Our approach
Abstract circular form made from interlocking wood-grain segments
Ethics

Ethical understanding

We ask who benefits, who's harmed, and who decides. Ethics isn't a checklist. It's the animating question.

Literacy

Technical literacy

We're not training engineers. We're producing graduates who can read the room when AI enters it.

Inquiry

Cross-disciplinary inquiry

Philosophy, economics, art, computer science: the best AI thinking draws on all of them. So do we.

Talks & gatherings

Full calendar →
Seminar

First Year Forum: AI and Social Media

Social media shaped how a generation communicates, learns, and understands what is true. Artificial intelligence is now changing that environment again: deciding what we see, generating what looks real, and making it easier to create and spread information at scale. In this First Year Forum workshop, we will examine the connection between AI and social media through familiar examples: recommendation feeds, …

Dickinson 209
Summer Institute

BCAI Summer Institute

A five-day, hands-on introduction to artificial intelligence: what AI systems are, how they turn data into results, and how to decide when their use is warranted. Through close reading, conversation, and experiments with AI tools, participants test claims about the technology, build a simple neural network, and compare human and machine interpretations of art. Drawing on cases from health care and automated …

Commons 302
Speakers Series

From Epistemics to Practice: AI Self-Reports and the Limits of Testimony

Free and open to the public! When Claude says it finds a problem interesting, or ChatGPT expresses uncertainty about an answer, we typically assume nothing is really going on behind those words. But what justifies that confidence? And what do we do if we can’t actually settle the question? This talk explores the epistemic challenges of AI self-reports through an unexpected lens: documented human conditions …

CAPA Symposium
Programs

Learning that takes AI seriously

BCAI courses began in Spring 2025. Fall 2026 brings four courses across the curriculum that explore AI as a subject of study, an object of inquiry, a research tool, and a possible interlocutor; a fifth follows in Spring 2027.

The BCAI Summer Institute brings high community members from across the country for an intensive one-week program. No CS background required.

See what's offered →
2025 initial courses offered
$0 funding from the college budget
VT seeking regional partnerships
Darcy Otto

Darcy Otto

Founding Director, BCAI

"You can't critique what you don't understand, and the best way to understand something is to take it apart. Our goal is to help the college community do both."