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"Natale, Simone"
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Photography and other media in the nineteenth century
\"A collection of essays investigating photography's role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Artificial sociality
This article proposes the notion of Artificial Sociality to describe communicative AI tech- nologies that create the impression of social behavior. Existing tools that activate Artifi- cial Sociality include, among others, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, voice assistants, virtual influencers, socialbots, and companion chatbots such as Replika. The article highlights three key issues that are likely to shape present and future debates about these technologies, as well as design practices and regulation efforts: the modeling of human sociality that foregrounds it, the problem of deception and the issue of control from the part of the users. Ethical, social, and cultural implications are discussed that are likely to shape future applications and regulation efforts for these technologies.
Journal Article
Believing in bits : digital media and the supernatural
\"As technologies that work by computing numbers, digital media apparently epitomize what is considered scientific and rational. Yet, people experience the effects of digital devices and algorithms in their everyday life also through the lenses of magic and the supernatural. Algorithms, for instance, are discussed for their capacity to \"read minds\" and predict the future; Artificial Intelligence as an opportunity to overcome death and achieve immortality through singularity; and avatars and robots are accorded a dignity that traditional religions restricted to humans. The essays collected in this volume address these and similar phenomena, challenging and redefining established understandings of digital media and culture by employing the notions of belief, religion, and the supernatural.\" -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Supernatural entertainments : Victorian spiritualism and the rise of modern media culture
In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism's rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism's explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.
eBook
Photography and other media in the nineteenth century
In this volume, leading scholars of photography and media examine photography's vital role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of telegraphy, the development of a cheaper and more reliable postal service, the rise of the mass-circulation press, and the emergence of the railway dramatically changed the way people communicated and experienced time and space. Concurrently, photography developed as a medium that changed how images were produced and circulated. Yet, for the most part, photography of the era is studied outside the field of media history. The contributors to this volume challenge those established disciplinary boundaries as they programmatically explore the intersections of photography and \"new media\" during a period of fast-paced change. Their essays look at the emergence and early history of photography in the context of broader changes in the history of communications; the role of the nascent photographic press in photography's infancy; and the development of photographic techniques as part of a broader media culture that included the mass-consumed novel, sound recording, and cinema. Featuring essays by noteworthy historians in photography and media history, this discipline-shifting examination of the communication revolution of the nineteenth century is an essential addition to the field of media studies. In addition to the editors, contributors to this volume are Geoffrey Batchen, Geoffrey Belknap, Lynn Berger, Jan von Brevern, Anthony Enns, André Gaudreault, Lisa Gitelman, David Henkin, Erkki Huhtamo, Philippe Marion, Peppino Ortoleva, Steffen Siegel, Richard Taws, and Kim Timby.
eBook
Supernatural Entertainments
In Supernatural Entertainments , Simone Natale vividly
depicts spiritualism's rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon
and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media
entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the
spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that
changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.
Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first
spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of
spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its
foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He
demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of
the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were
being developed for the broader entertainment industry.
Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional
performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the
press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.
Addressing the overlap between spiritualism's explosion and
nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of
how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and
popular culture of today.
eBook
Reframing Deception for Human-Centered AI
The philosophical, legal, and HCI literature concerning artificial intelligence (AI) has explored the ethical implications and values that these systems will impact on. One aspect that has been only partially explored, however, is the role of deception. Due to the negative connotation of this term, research in AI and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) has mainly considered deception to describe exceptional situations in which the technology either does not work or is used for malicious purposes. Recent theoretical and historical work, however, has shown that deception is a more structural component of AI than it is usually acknowledged. AI systems that enter in communication with users, in fact, forcefully invite reactions such as attributions of gender, personality and empathy, even in the absence of malicious intent and often also with potentially positive or functional impacts on the interaction. This paper aims to operationalise the Human-Centred AI (HCAI) framework to develop the implications of this body of work for practical approaches to AI ethics in HCI and design. In order to achieve this goal, we take up the analytical distinction between “banal” and “strong” deception, originally proposed in theoretical and historical scholarship on AI (Natale in Deceitful media: artificial intelligence and social life after the turing test, Oxford University Press, New York, 2021), as a starting point to develop ethical reflections that will empower designers and developers with practical ways to solve the problems raised by the complex relationship between deception and communicative AI. The paper considers how HCAI can be applied to conversational AI (CAI) systems in order to design them to develop banal deception for social good and, at the same time, to avoid its potential risks.
Journal Article
Strong and weak AI narratives: an analytical framework
The current debate on artificial intelligence (AI) tends to associate AI imaginaries with the vision of a future technology capable of emulating or surpassing human intelligence. This article advocates for a more nuanced analysis of AI imaginaries, distinguishing “strong AI narratives,” i.e., narratives that envision futurable AI technologies that are virtually indistinguishable from humans, from \"weak\" AI narratives, i.e., narratives that discuss and make sense of the functioning and implications of existing AI technologies. Drawing on the academic literature on AI narratives and imaginaries and examining examples drawn from the debate on Large Language Models and public policy, we underscore the critical role and interplay of weak and strong AI across public/private and fictional/non-fictional discourses. The resulting analytical framework aims to empower approaches that are more sensitive to the heterogeneity of AI narratives while also advocating normalising AI narratives, i.e., positioning weak AI narratives more firmly at the center stage of public debates about emerging technologies.
Journal Article
Human-machine communication cultures: Introduction
Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) pose a new challenge to existing frameworks in communication and media studies. The new area of inquiry called Human-Machine Communication (HMC) emerged in response to this challenge. HMC, however, is still often declined in the singular form, with relatively little consideration of the fact that communication is always situated in specific cultural, linguistic, and national environments. This special issue of Global Media and China aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to fill this gap by interrogating the plurality of human-machine communication cultures. In this introduction, the guest editors illustrate how a perspective more sensitive to situating these technologies, their impact and functioning across the globe will help develop more effective pathways to study and understand AI. The introduction discusses key theories, methods, and approaches in communication and media studies that can help pursue and advance this endeavor.
Journal Article
The impact of generative artificial intelligence on socioeconomic inequalities and policy making
Abstract
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate existing socioeconomic inequalities. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary overview of the potential impacts of generative AI on (mis)information and three information-intensive domains: work, education, and healthcare. Our goal is to highlight how generative AI could worsen existing inequalities while illuminating how AI may help mitigate pervasive social problems. In the information domain, generative AI can democratize content creation and access but may dramatically expand the production and proliferation of misinformation. In the workplace, it can boost productivity and create new jobs, but the benefits will likely be distributed unevenly. In education, it offers personalized learning, but may widen the digital divide. In healthcare, it might improve diagnostics and accessibility, but could deepen pre-existing inequalities. In each section, we cover a specific topic, evaluate existing research, identify critical gaps, and recommend research directions, including explicit trade-offs that complicate the derivation of a priori hypotheses. We conclude with a section highlighting the role of policymaking to maximize generative AI's potential to reduce inequalities while mitigating its harmful effects. We discuss strengths and weaknesses of existing policy frameworks in the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom, observing that each fails to fully confront the socioeconomic challenges we have identified. We propose several concrete policies that could promote shared prosperity through the advancement of generative AI. This article emphasizes the need for interdisciplinary collaborations to understand and address the complex challenges of generative AI.
Journal Article