Call for Papers

Special themed issue: AI and Media: ‘The future kept arriving’

Unlike most AFs, unlike Rosa, I’d always longed to more of the outside – and to see it in all its details” … (Klara, an Artificial Friend) … Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara & the Sun, 2021.

The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before. … Ian McEwen, Machines Like Me, 2019.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often touted as a solution to various contemporary social and economic challenges. However, critics have expressed concerns about the potential of AI to exacerbate existing inequalities, obscure important decision-making processes, and undermine the concept of human autonomy in relation to machines.

The debates surrounding ChatGPT demonstrate a clear divide between those who are fearful of the implications of AI and those who hold differing views regarding the technology’s potential, as evident in both popular and professional discourse on the topic. There are open source variants (GPT-NEO), multimodal variants (Midjourney, Stable Diffusion), local device variants (LLaMA), direct competitors (Google, Antrhopic), all of which complicate the homogenising discourse around ChatGPT.

We can consider 21st-century AI in its emergent and formative stages. The field is both unsettled and is momentarily set and then quickly contested by many kinds of professionals and others: technologists, start-up boffins and multinational companies to policy wonks, journalists, and activists are embedded in civil society.

This issue asks to find the controversies about the specific pathways to be taken that are still visible and to uncover aspects of closure and institutionalisation that may need to be examined.

 Questions

What are the historical, social, and ethical impacts of computing and artificial intelligence technologies, particularly those mediating social, communicational, and emotional expression?

Are there asymmetries of power, access, and justice when and how these systems are deployed in the world, and

What are the social and political challenges that technologists, policymakers, and the wider public face as a result?

What are antipodean / Global South / Oceanic perspectives that we could draw from, and the hybrid challenges / opportunities for local culture capture / preservation?

What are the specific affordances of language models, transformers, or neural networks for thinking concepts of organisation, language, subjectivity, and labour?

Topics

  • Journalism and automation of news gathering and production
  • Storytelling and AI true storytelling
  • Global, Local, and national areas of AI governance
  • AI Cultures and Practices
  • Media representations of AI
  • Ethics problems and solutions to AI controversies
  • Thinking and augmented knowledge in AI Labs / Scenes / Collaborations
  • Research Methods and AI
  • Mapping AI Public Discourses
  • AI Engagements: research, skills, and creative practices
  • Voice and language-driven intelligence
  • Ethical and Explainable AI
  • AI-powered cybersecurity
  • Generative AI
  • Sustainable AI
  • Machine Learning Ops
  • Federated learning
  • Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Augmented Working

Apart from referee papers, GMJ publishes non-refereed essays, commentaries, and book reviews. We encourage PhD students to submit papers related to the CfP.

Important dates

  • For consideration as a double-blind peer reviewed paper, submit papers (6-8K words) by September 11, 2023
  • Non-refereed essays, PhD submissions and book reviews: Submit work by October 30, 2023

GMJ/AU 2023 issue aims to be published on December 1.

 

For further enquiries, please contact the journal managing editors


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