Explorations in Media Ecology - Artificial Intelligence and Media Ecology, Jun 2024

This article explores the changing character of society in the age of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Adopting a media ecology perspective, the article highlights how generative AI drives polarization, promotes deception, and fosters exclusion and bias. The article is a call to action to minimize the worst excesses of the deployment of this technology to preserve societal interests.

This article goes back to McLuhan and Watson’s book From Cliché to Archetype, in its respective editions, regarding artistic recognition and treatment of media effects. It examines the core aspects of these texts as well as related Explorations in Media Ecology articles that help explain key aspects more clearly. The narrative relates these parallel constructs to those employed in information technology change management impact assessment. It situates these matters in terms of Bolter’s Digital Plenitude. The article presents a framework for combining these ideas and applying them in initiating an investigation of artificial intelligence academic use. This schema suggests tools that foster scholar and practitioner collaboration to better deal with an increasingly digitized environment. This article balances on the line between the theoretical and the pedagogical coming together in its final section to suggest a specific way to proceed in preparing for the next phases of the digital era.

Artificial intelligence (AI), the understanding and building of computational agents that act intelligently, is claimed to be a powerful, pervasive medium. Although we interact with it and hear a lot about it, we do not ‘see’ AI but experience its manifestations and/or outcomes, such as chatterbots and virtual assistants. A criterion for deeming an artificial agent as intelligent has been already proposed by Turing in 1950, coined as the ‘Imitation Game’, where a machine takes the place of a man, known as the Turing test. Despite the test being initially conceived as a make-believe game, AI has been enmeshed in major fields of human social activity and co-determines our lives. In this article, AI is compared with the media type of theatre performance, the epitome of make-believe, on the basis of intermediality. Furthermore, the analogies between AI and theatre are discussed and the paradigm of the puppet theatre as well as the medium of the mask prevail in the analysis. Findings are discussed, especially in light of the mind–body split and the alignment problem, and their implications are contemplated, allowing a re-estimation and re-framing of the Turing test in its theatrical and performative dimension.

In the rapidly evolving field of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 signifies a noteworthy juncture economically, in workplaces, and in education. This article explores the dual public perception of GenAI as both promising and controversial, especially in higher education. The study is rooted in ‘information ecologies’ to understand the integration and implications of new technologies in educational settings. Employing a ‘multiplicity’ method, the article emphasizes a self-reflexive, context-sensitive approach, utilizing digital ethnography and auto-ethnographic narratives to analyse the nuanced public perception and its effects on the use of AI in academia. The research underlines the importance of a balanced integration of AI, aiming for students to become proficient in managing AI products, which is essential for aligning educational practices with modern workplace demands.

Review of: The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Professions, Richard Susskind and Danel Susskind (2015)

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 346 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-19871-339-5, h/bk, USD 22.95