How tech comes for creative work

As the tech industry touts generative AI as a wondrous instrument with the power to unlock a wave of creative potential, wary creative workers facing the prospects of disruption and redundancy must grasp AI mythmaking in specific terms, and understand the full implications of how ideas like 'art' and 'creativity' are being redefined by executives and technical experts without production knowhow, craft knowledge and humanistic investments.

This presentation by Gerald Sim, Professor at the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida Atlantic University, will begin with an account of how Netflix tried to leverage its analytics research to launch an incursion of AI into media production workflows. Like so many tales about Silicon Valley of late, it is a story of hubris and profit-seeking in the name of enhancing productivity and efficiency. That cautionary anecdote is an eminently instructive one at a fraught time in media history.