Grant Palmer (University of California - Riverside)
gpal@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This panel invites papers from a wide range of interdisciplinary fields that critically engage with the cultural and narrative discussions and representations of AI as it has been portrayed in popular media, film, literature, and video games. AI has appeared in filmic representations including and Lang's Metropolis (1929), Kubrick's HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), and Johnstone's M3GAN (2023), to the antagonist of video games like Nier: Automata (2017), Pokémon: Violet and Scarlet (2022), Portal (2007), and Horizon Zero Dawn/ Horizon Forbidden West (2017/2022). How has popular media influenced an anthropomorphic and often antagonistic narrative around AI, and how else has AI been represented in popular media aside from a harbinger of humanities impending doom?

Artificial Intelligence has been receiving a large range of press regarding its potential as an industrial productivity tool due to a perceived promise of eliminating human labor and perfecting productivity, as well as a perceived threat to the very safety and future of humanity. Despite the media overexposure, little has been discussed regarding the cultural and fictive narratives that often overshadow and obfuscate the actual characteristics and capabilities of the technology. Nearly fifty years after the publication of Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason (1976), recent news media has anecdotally framed AI as a threat to the college classroom, a threat to creative fields like writing and fine art, and a threat to the development of future jobs in media and computer programming industries.

But why has the narrative surrounding AI been overdetermined as an existential threat? This panel invites papers from a wide range of interdisciplinary fields that critically engage with the cultural and narrative discussions and representations of AI as it has been portrayed in popular media, film, literature, and video games. AI has appeared in filmic representations including and Lang's Metropolis (1929), Kubrick's HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), and Johnstone's M3GAN (2023), to the antagonist of video games like Nier: Automata (2017), Pokémon: Violet and Scarlet (2022), Portal (2007), and Horizon Zero Dawn/ Horizon Forbidden West (2017/2022). How has popular media influenced an anthropomorphic and often antagonistic narrative around AI, and how else has AI been represented in popular media aside from a harbinger of humanity's impending doom?