Roundtable: generative AI as a media technology Tarleton Gillespie(1), Aleena Chia(2), Kate Miltner(3), Caitlin Petre(4), Jill Walker Rettberg(5), Luke Stark(6) 1: Microsoft Research, USA; 2: Goldsmiths University of London, UK; 3: University of Sheffield, UK; 4: Rutgers University, USA; 5: University of Bergen, Norway; 6: Western University, Canada
The fields of media and internet studies could make a unique contribution to the public and scholarly consideration of generative AI. Public debates have focused on the capacities and shortcomings of these systems, as well as warnings of disruption from existing industries and communities. Much of the social scientific scholarship on AI has focused on the inequities of allocation – when automated systems currently dole out or withhold valuable public resources (job opportunities, search results, policing, medical diagnosis, etc.). These are all important. But generative AI shifts us towards concerns about _production_ as much as distribution. And much of what these tools produce, and are imagined to be for, are media. Like other media production tools, from the paintbrush to the camera lens, generative AI will subtly change what can be made, under what arrangements, and with what implications. This roundtable begins by asserting that generative AI are media technologies, significant to the production of media, information, and culture. We will discuss: - shifts in the vocabularies of media forms or genres; - embedded tendencies toward or away from specific cultural representations; - changing practices and priorities in existing creative industries; - the economic arrangements, many borrowed from media, that will fund and structure generative AI as commercial enterprises; - shifting logics of expertise, trust, collaboration, or authorship. This is an exercise in field extension: What lessons from the scholarship around media - including media industry studies, the sociology of media cultures, and the sociotechnical study of media technologies – could be brought to bear on generative AI? Which scholars and readings, analytical questions, or long-standing intellectual priorities should be extended to the critical analysis of generative AI? Panelists are international media scholars who have begun to think about generative AI in the context of storytelling, image generation, gaming, animation, and journalism.
