A research network developing perspectives from Brazil, Chile, India, Japan and Nigeria
This project investigates how generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies are integrated in the cultural industries around the globe. We ask:
What do creativity and creative autonomy mean when cultural production centrally involves GenAI technologies?
How does the adoption of GenAI technology affect the precarity of cultural work and the well documented lack of fair work?
How does the uptake of GenAI in the cultural industries reshape the political economy of media?
To address these questions, the project builds partnerships with academic institutions and industry organizations across media industry sectors and regions. Our goal is to facilitate broader, global conversations among scholars, industry stakeholders, cultural creators, and policymakers.
Current academic research and public debate on GenAI and cultural production is strongly focused on the United States and North Western Europe. Yet crucial shifts are also taking place in many other parts of the world, often in different ways and with different consequences. This project therefore develops perspectives from key cultural industries in vital urban regions in Brazil, India, Chile, Japan, Nigeria, and beyond as alternative starting points for our collective inquiry.
The examined industry sectors include the screen industries, the music industry, creators and influencers, and marketing and advertising, all of which are at the forefront of GenAI integration. Moreover, the examined sectors and regions demonstrate significant variation in terms of social relations, corporate structures, regional GenAI development, and state regulation. As such, rather than developing a classic comparison between industries and regions, we construct them as key reference points to examine and conceptualize how GenAI is adopted, negotiated, and governed by cultural producers and other stakeholders in the global media industry.
This project was initiated by Thomas Poell and David Nieborg. Over the past decade, they have analyzed relations of dependence between cultural producers, such as game developers, journalists, and creators, and leading platform companies, including Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tencent, and ByteDance. This work has resulted in Platforms and Cultural Production, a book co-authored with Brooke Erin Duffy and translated into Italian and Chinese.
In their research on platforms and cultural industries, Poell and Nieborg were constantly confronted by the dominance of Europe and the Anglo American world in this field of study. Despite decades of postcolonial and decolonial critiques, as well as efforts to decolonize or dewesternize media and communication research, central concepts in the field continue to bear the imprint of Western institutions, cultural practices, and ideals. Moreover, these concepts are often implicitly presented as universal.
Universalist theory prevents scholars from understanding the specificity of cultural production in the US or Europe, while it shuts out research on other parts of the world from the conceptual conversation in leading journals and conferences.
Hence, they see an urgent need to multiply the frames of reference in research on cultural production and technological change. This objective is pursued with a team of scholars, who each bring particular expertise and perspectives to the project.
Lorena Caminhas joins the project with a Latin American perspective on digital technologies, the transformation of work, and emerging local creative economies. Her contribution to the project follows directly from her long-term research on marginalised content creation in Brazil, extending that expertise to the development and adoption of GenAI technologies and the consequent shifts in work and industrial practices. It also builds on her earlier efforts to rethink and contextualise digital technologies within localised realities such as Latin America, as well as to reconsider concepts like labour precarity and relational labour from the standpoint of local actors. The subproject she is leading explores the Brazilian creator economy from the standpoint of creators and industry stakeholders and seeks to understand the consequences of the uptake of GenAI for creative processes and industrial reorganisation. The subproject forms part of her broader commitment to building a Latin American approach to platform and AI studies.
Smith Mehta brings the experience of Indian media industries into wider debates on generative AI and cultural production. In this effort, he builds on his research on media industries and cultural production in India and the Global South. His work examines how technological change becomes embedded in existing industrial structures and how it reshapes the conditions of cultural work. In the subproject he is leading, Mehta studies how generative AI tools enter Indian film, television and streaming industries. He examines the political and economic forces that shape their adoption and the interests that influence how generative AI is introduced into media production. His research also considers how the growing use of generative AI changes the organisation and value of creative work as well as prevailing understandings of creativity and authorship.
Contributing to the project, Zhen Ye builds on her research on new media technologies and the transformation of media cultures and economies in East Asia. Her previous research project investigated the platform economy of livestreaming and revealed the entanglement of state governance, platform incentives, intermediation, and digital labour of livestreamers in China. The Chinese platform society is often considered in isolation from discussions on livestreaming culture in the West. Confronted with the sharp contrast between the rich and complex East Asian media landscape and the lack of engagement from Western scholarship, she came on board with this project. She sees the project as part of her on-going efforts to bring Asian media culture research in dialogue with research from other parts of the world. In the subproject she is leading, Ye explores GenAI integration into Japan’s manga and anime industry to foster connections between international scholars and Japanese academia and industrial stakeholders. This subproject is developed within her JSPS research project with Prof. Hiromi Tanaka at Meiji University.
Godwin Simon joins the project with a deep understanding of Nigeria’s evolving media landscape, particularly its film and content creation industries. His previous research documents the cultural and economic impacts of streaming services and digital platforms in the Nigerian film industry (Nollywood), highlighting shifts in production cultures, the reconfiguration of informal economies, evolving industry-audience dynamics, and the disruption of traditional power structures. He has also investigated platformised labour within Nigeria’s rapidly growing creator economy. Godwin views this program as a vital platform to advance discussions on technological disruption and structural change in the Nigerian media industries. Grounded in the country’s unique political economies and institutional frameworks of media industries, his current research interrogates how Generative AI reshapes existing power dynamics, endemic informal economies, production norms, and creative workflows within the industries. It also questions the notions of creative democratisation, precarious labor, and data justice in the context of GenAI and global media industries.
Arturo Arriagada draws on a decade of work on digital platforms, cultural intermediaries, and creative labor in Latin America. Through his research lab, Culture and Digital Society, he has studied how content creators, gig workers and musicians in Chile sustain careers under platform conditions, including an investigation of the ways musicians interpret and act on Spotify’s metrics, algorithms, and monetization logics in order to reach audiences and make a living. He currently leads, with Matías Valderrama, the project Creative Work in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI): An Exploratory Approach to Imaginaries and Practices in Chile’s Creative Industries (2026–2030), which analyses how the culture of creative work is changing across four sectors: music, media, audiovisual, and video games. The project traces the imaginaries workers hold about the technology, the practices through which they incorporate it, and the social controversies its use provokes. It is funded by Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development (ANID-FONDECYT 1261490).
Tracking the uptake of GenAI in cultural production across the globe, we seek to leverage our collective expertise to address our core questions about creativity, precarity, and the political economy of media from a multitude of perspectives.
Denaturalize and rethink dominant concepts and ideas through research from around the globe.
Explicitly thematize and examine the global power relations that structure media economies.
Critically interrogate the knowledge production about these economies.