Artificial Intelligence In Cultural Production

This book offers an in-depth academic discourse on the convergence of AI, digital platforms, and popular culture, in order to understand the ways in which the platform and cultural industries have reshaped and developed AI-driven algorithmic cultural production and consumption. At a time of fundamental change for the media and cultural industries, driven by the emergence of big data, algorithms, and AI, the book examines how media ecology and popular culture are evolving to serve the needs of both media and cultural industries and consumers. The analysis documents global governments’ rapid development of AI-relevant policies and identifies key policy issues; examines the ways in which cultural industries firms utilize AI and algorithms to advance the new forms of cultural production and distribution; investigates change in cultural consumption by analyzing the ways in which AI, algorithms, and digital platforms reshape people’s consumption habits; and examines whether governments and corporations have advanced reliable public and corporate policies and ethical codes to secure socio-economic equality. Offering a unique perspective on this timely and vital issue, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in media studies, communication studies, anthropology, globalization studies, sociology, cultural studies, Asian studies, and science and technology studies (STS).

This book brings together the work of historians and sociologists with perspectives from media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and information studies to address the origins, practices, and possible futures of contemporary machine learning. From its foundations in 1950s and 1960s pattern recognition and neural network research to the modern-day social and technological dramas of DeepMind’s AlphaGo, predictive political forecasting, and the governmentality of extractive logistics, machine learning has become controversial precisely because of its increased embeddedness and agency in our everyday lives. How can we disentangle the history of machine learning from conventional histories of artificial intelligence? How can machinic agents’ capacity for novelty be theorized? Can reform initiatives for fairness and equity in AI and machine learning be realized, or are they doomed to cooptation and failure? And just what kind of “learning” does machine learning truly represent? We empirically address these questions and more to provide a baseline for future research. Chapter 2 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book springs from a conference held in Stockholm in May June 1988 on Culture, Language and Artificial Intelligence. It assembled more than 300 researchers and practitioners in the fields of technology, philosophy, history of ideas, literature, lin guistics, social science, etc. It was an initiative from the Swedish Center for Working Life, based on the project AI-Based Systems and the Future of Language, Knowledge and Responsibility in Professions within the COST 13 programme of the European Commission. Participants in the conference, or in some cases researchers related to its aims, were chosen to contribute to this book. It was preceded by Knowledge, Skill and Artificial Intelligence (ed. B. G6ranzon and 1. Josefson, Springer-Verlag, London, 1988) and will be followed by Dialogue and Technology (ed. M. Florin and B. Goranzon, Springer-Verlag, London, 1990). The contributors' thinking in this field varies greatly; so do their styles of writing. For example: contributors have varied in their choice of 'he' or 'he/she' for the third person. No distinction is intended but chapters have been left with the original usage to avoid extensive changes. Similarly, individual contributor's preferences as to notes or references lists have been followed. We want to thank our researcher Satinder P. Gill for excellent work with summaries and indexes, and Sandi Irvine of Springer Verlag for eminent editorial work.

The first of its kind, this book focuses on empirical studies into creative output that use and test the systems approach. The collection of work from cultural studies, sociology, psychology, communication and media studies, and the arts depicts holistic and innovative ways to understand creativity as a system in action.

This book focuses on the intelligent technologies that are transforming creative practices and industries. The future of creative work will be more complicated than “the robots will take our jobs.” The workplace is becoming increasingly hybridized, with human and computational labor complementing each other. Some economic roles for the former will no doubt fade over time, while new roles are created to produce artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies and implementations for productivity. New tools for the generation and personalization of content across platforms will be as ubiquitous as the automation of repetitive tasks in content creation workflows. Cultural conceptions of what it means to be a creative worker will necessarily change as a result of these transformations in human-machine labor. The volume covers the possibilities of humans and robots developing collegial relationships, creative cybernetics as machines and artists become co-creators of art, the reconcentration of corporate power as AI transforms the music industry, the rhetoric of algorithm-driven cultural production in streaming media and how artisans provide a model of counter-hegemony to automation processes. Scholars and students from many backgrounds, as well as policy makers, journalists and the general reading public, will find a multidisciplinary approach to questions posed by creative labor and industry research from communication, philosophy, robotics, media, music and the creative arts, informatics, information science, and computer science and engineering.

This open access book aims to set an agenda for research and action in the field of Digital Humanism through short essays written by selected thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including computer science, philosophy, education, law, economics, history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. This initiative emerged from the Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism and the associated lecture series. Digital Humanism deals with the complex relationships between people and machines in digital times. It acknowledges the potential of information technology. At the same time, it points to societal threats such as privacy violations and ethical concerns around artificial intelligence, automation and loss of jobs, ongoing monopolization on the Web, and sovereignty. Digital Humanism aims to address these topics with a sense of urgency but with a constructive mindset. The book argues for a Digital Humanism that analyses and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind toward a better society and life while fully respecting universal human rights. It is a call to shaping technologies in accordance with human values and needs.

This book explores how creativity is increasingly designed, marketed, and produced with digital products and services — a process referred to as softwarization. If ‘being creative’ has developed into one of the paradigmatic architectures of power for framing the contemporary subject, then an essential component of this architecture involves its material and symbolic configuration through tools. From image editors to digital audio workstations, video editors to game engines, these modern tools are used by creatives every day, and mastering these increasingly complex technologies is now a near-compulsory pathway to creative work. Despite their ubiquity in cultural production, few have sought to theorize them in aggregate and with interdisciplinary breadth. By bringing disparate creative and methodological traditions in one volume, this book provides a comprehensive overview of approaches for understanding this complex, emerging, and dynamic field that speaks beyond the disciplinary categories of ‘tool,’ ‘instrument,’ and/or ‘software’. It makes a unique intervention in the fields of cultural production and the cultural and creative industries. ​