Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly utilized in cultural industries such as music, films, television, social media, games, and journalism, shaping new forms of popular culture. How can we understand AI-saturated cultural production in the digital era and its impacts on our cultural lives? Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Production: Critical Perspectives on Digital Platforms, by Dal Yong Jin, draws a perspective of convergence to critically explore the complex relationships between AI, digital platforms, and popular culture. Instead of merely analyzing how AI is used in cultural practices, this work focuses on AI’s role, influence, and involvement in popular culture. The author adopts political, economic, and globalization approaches to engage in theoretical and practical conversations. Various nation-state case studies from across the globe are brought into a comprehensive exploration of this topic.
The author first examines an essential question about how cultural production is revolutionized by AI technology in cultural and media industries. Chapter 1 maps out the background, research gaps, and core goals of this work, teasing out cutting-edge trends in AI development. It lays the groundwork for discussing AI’s vital role in popular culture and to illustrate how digital technology is a transformative force of cultural production. Chapter 2 constructs a historical and theoretical framework for understanding the convergent relationship between AI, digital platforms, and popular culture. AI is presented as a powerful mediator to forge new media and cultural ecologies in the digital era by comparing exemplary countries in the Global North and Global South. Chapter 3 offers a particular account of how governments play an interventionist role in collaborating with cultural firms and digital platforms to adjust cultural policies, boosting the so-called “AI-driven” digital economy as a new pillar for national economic growth. This has led to an increasing tendency of counter-neoliberalism appearing in many nation-states, indicating that AI-raised negative impacts should be measured in public policymaking rather than merely as an economic consideration.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are closely interlinked to unpack an integral process on how the use of AI is embedded in popular culture’s production, distribution, and consumption. Chapter 4 analyzes partnerships between global cultural enterprises and AI companies, delineating modalities for cooperation in film, music, digital gaming, and webtoon. The author argues that AI’s involvement has revolutionarily transformed the global order of popular cultural production by profiling Western and non-Western representative cultural products, such as Spotify, TikTok, K-pop, and NCSOFT. Taking Netflix as a case study, Chapter 5 examines the convergence of AI, algorithms, and digital platforms. It finds that digital platforms are deconstructing television and movie theaters as hegemonic centers of entertainment consumption and re-articulating a new ecosystem of global entertainment and new norms for cultural industries. That is, platforms use AI and algorithms to fundamentally shift methods of content production and distribution. The personalization of consumption culture emerged in the AI age is elaborated in Chapter 6 to understand a new relationship between platforms and consumers (audiences). It argues that the identity of consumers is re-articulated by AI and algorithms, resulting in prominent changes of consumption habits. However, the author not only acknowledges AI’s contribution in cultural creation but constantly keeps us warned about the socio-cultural risks potentially posed by AI in use.
In Chapter 7, the author expands his exploration on how AI has facilitated the transformation of news culture in content production, circulation, consumption, and its extensive convergence with digital technologies. The author critically discusses AI’s negative impacts in immoderately producing fake news, disinformation, and misinformation on social media platforms. Following the different ethical problems addressed, Chapter 8 develops a referential framework of new media ethics calling for governments, digital platforms, and cultural corporations to optimize their codes of ethics. This initiative is treated to protect social-cultural fairness and justice, and to maintain sustainable cooperation between humans and digital technologies. In Chapter 9, the author summarizes his core argument that “our present cultural order is based upon a vast spread of AI intersecting with everyday social life” (p. 156). This means that AI-related digital technologies are used as an indispensable and dominant actor in the production of popular culture, with AI working with digital platforms to not merely factualize the circulation of cultural content but create cultural products themselves.
The significant contribution of this book is to clarify the unexplored intersections between digital platforms, AI, and popular culture. It has revealed convergent approaches of both AI and digital platforms to transform traditional cultural practices and profoundly reconfigure people’s cultural activities and everyday lives. The author expounds on how AI involves working with entire mechanisms of cultural production, distribution, and consumption, as well as its negative aspects. Due to this accessible structure, readers feel it easier to grasp the positive and negative effects of AI’s utilization in digitalized cultural production. Indeed, this work features interdisciplinary scholarship that has enriched digital platforms and critical AI studies to some extent, replenishing the latest research, Platforms and Cultural Production, authored by Thomas Poell et al. (2021). The latter constructs platforms as an infrastructure’s role in cultural production, but the former focuses on understanding AI as a revolutionary force working with platforms to lead the production of popular culture.
The author has a global view of establishing balanced academic debates on AI-driven cultural production between the Global North and the Global South. Based on practical experiences, many creative and critical viewpoints generated in the book are of great value in cultural studies pertaining to digital technology. Although the book considers cultural policy and ethical considerations, it could benefit from further engagement concerning the platforms’ regulation problems. We suggest that this book could be paired with Terry Flew’s (2021) Regulating Platforms to provoke more insights concerning AI’s utilization and platform governance. Finally, we appreciate this book’s value, as it constructs an umbrella-like framework for understanding pluralistic ideas concerning convergence when popular culture encounters AI in digital platforms.
