Conference Agenda

The paper explores the use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in creative production of images and videos. We focus on Runway, a US based AI company developing multimodal foundation models geared toward video editors and VFX artists. We borrow from science and technology studies, critical data studies and media studies to examine how GenAI technologies are mediating creative production, idealizing (affordances of) tools, and disrupting creative workflow. We pay close attention to embedded assumptions about the users, design choices, and technical constraints in the creative production. Using the app walkthrough method, we analyze the temporal and technical aspects of the creative workflow as mediated by Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha model. Our research shows three dominant ways in which Runway conceptualizes creative production: immediacy (blurring ideation and execution); iterativity (prompt engineering); and control (agency as transferred from creative thinking and doing to aesthetic judgement). In this way, the model emphasizes creativity where linguistic interaction, via prompting, relies on continuous exercise of aesthetic judgment constrained by the technical system (source datasets, algorithms, parameters); it shifts the locus of creative production by widening the gap between thinking and doing in creative practice. Hence, these “new” technologies propose moments of rupture wherein logics of industrial productivity, extraction, and automation are reinforced, and creative expertise, skills, autonomy, and professional identity of creative workers are reshaped.

Since the spectacular launch of ChatGPT from OpenAI in November 2022, we’ve seen extraordinary investment and growth across sectors in the realm of generative AI systems that produce synthetic media in the form of text, images, videos, music and voices. In attempts to make Big Tech’s Big Bet on AI pay off, social media platforms have been frantically seeking ways to incorporate this new technology into their affordances. Despite their best attempts to frame generative AI in a positive light, platforms have faced a backlash from creative workers on a number of fronts, with much of the debate focusing on the issue of intellectual property and the massive amounts of data scraping required to train Large Language Models. This paper examines the contestations between platforms, creators and intermediaries grappling with the issue of intellectual property, as each attempts to control the rapidly evolving future of generative AI in the creator economy. Deploying a critical media industry studies framework, we consider the push and pull between macroeconomic forces and the ways cultural producers are navigating, circumventing and subverting institutional and structural interests to their own ends. We draw on a corpus of data that includes corporate promotional materials such as platform blogs and generative AI tool announcements from YouTube, Meta, and TikTok; websites, white papers, and promotional materials about tools created to resist AI scraping from emerging intermediaries, including Overlai, Nightshade and Glaze; and popular and trade press articles relating to generative AI, platforms and debates around intellectual property.

This paper develops the analytical framework of “platform evacuation” to explore the dynamics of collective departure and migration of users from a social media platform due to a crisis in or of platform governance. Drawing on internet research addressing platform governance, platform cultures, creator practices, and digital memory work, we theorise “platform evacuation” as grounded in changes to governance by platforms or governance on platforms and requiring strategic management of a community across experiences of disruption, uncertainty and loss. Influencers, creators, and mainstream celebrities demonstrate evacuation leadership through public announcements of departure, commemorations of nostalgia and loss, and negotiations of community migration, reconfiguring existing practices as well as developing specific tactics to navigate the urgency, precarity and politics of crisis. “Platform evacuation” is oriented towards identifying and understanding strategies, performances, and narratives used to manage both voluntary or forced withdrawal from connective networks that users depend upon for work, interaction, and daily life. Our account of evacuation practices across the temporal unfolding of the 2025 US TikTok ban illustrates the stages of platform evacuation: creators explained the politics of evacuation through memetic content, engaged in platform remembrance and mourning, encouraged community migration and performed curtain calls. Thinking with temporalities, spatialities and discourses of platform evacuation, we propose, allows for a critical examination of collective departures and migrations from social media platforms as anticipated, instigated, and negotiated.

In this essay, we argue that the term “hate raiding” requires clearer definition within digital platform studies scholarship to combat efforts to apply the term to anti-brand protests (Murphy & Jarrett 2024). To render our definition, we use critical game studies scholarship (Trammell 2023, Giddings & Harvey 2018) to analyze how the conditions of reciprocity and play on Twitch.tv (Twitch) produce the conditions for hate raids to occur as playful (Scholl 2024), non-antisocial behavior. In other words, we insist that hate raids should not be viewed as transgressive acts of play, or morally motivated forms of networked harassment (Marwick 2021), arguing that this type of harassment is a consequence of ludic economics in general (Giddings & Harvey) and the sociality cultivated on Twitch in particular. Through thoughtful discursive, infrastructural, and rhetorical analysis of Twitch.tv’s branding and platform governance, we demonstrate that hate raiding is not a bug, but in fact a feature of the live streaming platform.