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A word on the why

I founded HUMAIN on a critical premise: the future is too important to be left to code alone. We are designing the most consequential technology in history. But algorithms optimise for metrics, not meaning. They solve for speed, not truth. If we treat AI purely as a technical puzzle, we risk engineering a future that works perfectly but feels empty.

The answer is a new alliance. We need the engineer’s precision and the historian’s memory; the innovator’s drive and the philosopher’s ethics. I created this network to forge that unity — to ensure that, as we construct the machine, we do not lose the human.

Meet the convenor

Dean J. Hill is a postgraduate researcher in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. His thesis, "The Ministry of AI: Inside the Algorithmic Panopticon", moves beyond technical critique to treat platforms like TikTok and Google as complex cultural governance systems.

Hill is a member of the Alan Turing Network, the national institute for data science and AI, and the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), the UK’s largest and oldest AI society. He balances this technical engagement with a dedicated practice in the literary sector as Senior Reader for Ploughshares, the prestigious journal based at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

Following a tenure with Harvard Review, he held the editorship of the human rights magazine Voice. Today, alongside his duties at Ploughshares and as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the independent publication Zimmer, he maintains a rigorous engagement with new fiction. This commitment to the politics of language is perhaps most visible in his support of the Orwell Youth Prize. His broader dedication to narrative excellence extends to his work as a reader for several international competitions including the Highland Book Prize, Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction and the 2026 Open Season Awards for Canada’s seminal literary quarterly Malahat Review.

This interdisciplinary approach was recognised by the Dickens Society, where he was named recipient of the 2024 Partlow Prize for connecting the industrial utilitarianism of Hard Times to the rise of Generative AI (GenAI). He has also marked his entry into George Orwell Studies with his debut article, "TikTok Live and the Digital Afterlife of Orwell's Big Brother", and a critical review of clandestine scholarship in Communist Poland. He regularly disseminates research at academic forums as varied as the Open University and Political Studies Association, where he presented on the linguistic fingerprints of deepfakes.

To ensure this critique is grounded in operational reality, Hill is currently undertaking a technical roadmap to validate his skills in the very systems he analyses. In 2026, he will qualify as an NVIDIA-Certified Associate in Generative AI and LLMs and an AWS Certified AI Practitioner, ensuring his humanities research is built on a practical understanding of machine learning architectures.

Hill’s perspective is further grounded in operational practice, not just university life. During his undergraduate years in 2010, he spent time with the BBC, a formative period that preceded a multi-year internship with Sony Music Entertainment. He subsequently transitioned into the education sector, accumulating over a decade of experience in professional services.

Away from the screen, his reading habits are wide-ranging. He remains grounded in the classics, alternating between the social panoramas of Charles Dickens, psychological depth of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the biting wit of Oscar Wilde. He is just as likely to be found absorbed in the mysteries of Agatha Christie or the storytelling of Stephen King as he is the speculative worlds of George Orwell, Margaret Atwood and Anthony Burgess.