[Petit Fours #402] On art, automation, and the adoption of generative AI
Hi, everyone! Here’s what I’ve got for you this week:
#1 New Media and Society recently published a special issue on Automating Communication in the Digital Society. To start, I recommend checking out the editorial by Christian Katzenbach and Christian Pentzold: “Automation is a defining feature of today’s societies—not only since ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence (AI) have accomplished to produce yet another wave of hype. This essay introduces a special issue on automation and communication in the digital society. It aims to study how subjectivity, agency, and empowerment become defined and reconfigured in novel human–machine encounters and, more broadly, in societies which in large parts are kept going and sustained by complex digital infrastructures. The issue includes contributions from a wide array of disciplines and perspectives and engages with conditions, contexts, and consequences of automation in very different settings ranging from journalism to self-service hotels, and from social movements in Hong Kong to the Russian Invasion to the Ukraine. The articles offer critical perspectives on the transition of human activity into machine operations, and back, as well on the social dynamics changing and emerging in increasingly digitized and datafied societies.“
#2 good artists copy, ai artists ____ by Celine Nguyen is a long essay – and well worth reading: “I sometimes feel like AI can do that is the 2024 version of looking at a logo design, or an ad campaign, and going, I could have made that. But the ability to technically reproduce an existing work is not the same as having the ability to bring that work into being.”
#3 If you are in or around Stockholm in early October, don’t miss out on this seminar with Tamara Kneese at Södertörn: “The School of Historical and Contemporary Studies invites you to a seminar organized collaboratively by members of the departments of Ethnology and Archaeology. We’re delighted to welcome anthropologist and media scholar, Dr Tamara Kneese. Dr Kneese is Director of Algorithmic Impact Methods Lab, Data & Society, and author of Death Glitch, How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond, published by Yale University Press in 2023. The seminar will be held at Södertörn, in MA 432 on Wednesday, October 2, 2024, from 14:00-16:00.” If you’d like to attend from outside of Södertörn, please email Jane Ruffino or Daniel Bodén.
#4 This report is interesting for parents and scholars alike: The Dawn of the AI Era: Teens, Parents, and the Adoption of Generative AI at Home and School
-A