AI Afterlives offers the first-ever empirically informed investigation of how algorithms and automation are being used to ''revive'' media fragments from the past, from animating old photographs of our ancestors, to creating deathbots or using the likeness of deceased actors in films. It traces the ethical, emotional, and political dimensions of creating synthetic pasts, and critically examines the infrastructures and platforms that enable and encourage them. This book carries out a rigorous and comprehensive analysis of AI ''resurrection'' in the contexts of grief, family history and genealogy, the cultural and creative industries, and heritage institutions. It draws on a series of unique and innovatively designed datasets, exploring how synthetically remediated pasts afford new networked, technological, temporal, spatial and affective realities for archival materials, and impact individual, collective, and cultural memory work as a consequence. Situated at the intersection of Digital Memory, New Media and Critical Algorithm Studies, this book speaks to a range of pressing concerns about what futures our uses of AI will facilitate, what ethical challenges these systems suggest in the present, and how our relationship to the past is oriented and experienced.

Autorentext
Jenny Kidd is a Reader at Cardiff University, UK, researching across the fields of digital media, culture and the creative industries. She has a particular interest in digital cultural heritage, transmedia, self-representation and immersive storytelling, and has published widely on these themes in, for example, Museums in the New Mediascape (Ashgate 2014), Representation (Routledge 2015), and Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling (Routledge 2018). She has published in related journals including Information, Technology and People and Continuum, and on related themes in International Journal of Heritage Studies, The Journal of Curatorial Studies and Museum and Society. Jenny is Co-Director of the Digital Media and Society research group in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, a committee member of the UK Digital Learning Network and in 2016 was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts. She has been an advisor for Welsh Government on digital culture in the curriculum (2018) and has worked closely with the creative sector since 2002 including with BBC Wales, Amguedfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, Tate, yello brick, the Tower of London and Imperial War Museums. Jenny has led collaborative immersive media projects including With New Eyes I See (2013) and Traces-Olion (2016). Eva Nieto McAvoy is a Lecturer at King's College London, UK.

Klappentext
AI Afterlives offers the first-ever empirically informed investigation of how algorithms and automation are being used to 'revive' media fragments from the past, from animating old photographs of our ancestors, to creating deathbots or using the likeness of deceased actors in films. It traces the ethical, emotional, and political dimensions of creating synthetic pasts, and critically examines the infrastructures and platforms that enable and encourage them. This book carries out a rigorous and comprehensive analysis of AI 'resurrection' in the contexts of grief, family history and genealogy, the cultural and creative industries, and heritage institutions. It draws on a series of unique and innovatively designed datasets, exploring how synthetically remediated pasts afford new networked, technological, temporal, spatial and affective realities for archival materials, and impact individual, collective, and cultural memory work as a consequence. Situated at the intersection of Digital Memory, New Media and Critical Algorithm Studies, this book speaks to a range of pressing concerns about what futures our uses of AI will facilitate, what ethical challenges these systems suggest in the present, and how our relationship to the past is oriented and experienced.

Inhalt

List of figures
List of tables

1. Introduction: Deep learning technologies and the future past
2. Synthetic media | Synthetic pasts
3. Genealogy platforms and AI afterlives
4. Deathbots and the platformisation of remembering
5. Datafied bodies on stage and screen
6. AI afterlives in the museum
7. Conclusion
8. Data coda
   Bibliography