Leigh Johnson, American University

Professor Leigh Johnson’s career spans nearly two decades in higher education. Her areas of expertise range from moral and political philosophy, to critical race theory and gender theory, to bioethics and emergent technologies. She is committed to fostering intellectual curiosity and social awareness, mentoring students and innovative projects outside the classroom. Johnson is also an accomplished podcast producer, video editor, and their real-world implications. She is the managing editor and producer of the podcast Hotel Bar Sessions. She lends her multifaceted experience to her strong commitment to foster critical discourse and leveraging philosophical insights in our fast-evolving digital landscape.

“Delete, Retain, Haunt: The Spectral Ethics of AI Memory”

This paper develops a hauntological account of AI memory, drawing on Derrida to challenge standard framings of deletion and retention. I argue that phenomena such as hallucinations, catastrophic forgetting, and biased outputs should be understood as spectral returns rather than technical errors. AI systems function as haunted archives, where traces reappear unpredictably and resist full mastery. Recasting these dynamics in hauntological terms shifts the ethical question: responsibility is not achieved by eliminating ghosts but by learning how to live with them critically and justly.