UBC Theses and Dissertations

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UBC Theses and Dissertations

We’re cooked : creative responses to generative AI and atmospheres of technocapitalism on Twitter Stewart, Trinity

Abstract

Leading up to November 2022, generative AI art tools such as OpenAI’s DALL-E (January 2021), Hugging Face’s Craiyon (April 2022), and Midjourney (July 2022), were steadily gaining popularity. However, the release of OpenAI’s AI text-based tool, ChatGPT, in November 2022 brought many new eyes to the world of generative AI, boosting both the visibility, and eventually the prevalence of such tools. With increased attention from non-technical communities, generative AI became a topic of intense scrutiny online, with discussions and debates growing across many social media sites. One particularly vocal group has been Twitter’s creative community, composed of artists, voice actors, video game developers, and more, who have taken to the platform to share their diverse perspectives and concerns. This thesis explores the affective atmospheres that arose from Twitter’s creative community between November 2022 and February 2024, locating negative emotional responses to generative AI within the larger context of neoliberal and technocapitalist ideologies. I also examine Twitter as a place with agency, recognizing the interplay between users of the platform and its algorithm; this project is a qualitative analysis that relies on a set of tweets, made by creatives, and selected by the algorithm through interactions with Twitter’s “For You” page. In this way, AI tools are both a subject, as a key “villain” of the narrative, and through the algorithm, a collaborator. I close by moving beyond emotional responses to generative AI, focusing instead on efforts made by creatives to mobilize and resist exploitation.

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Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International