The second speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is the great Raul Ferrer-Conill, whose focus is on government strategies for protecting citizens’ rights to their user data. This has become particularly critical in the context of generative AI, which uses user data to train Large Language Models; additionally, there is also the constant datafication of citizens in many other contexts.
This is being addressed in part through Data Protection Officers (PDOs): these are tasked with taking care of and championing data privacy. Who are these people, and what are their tasks? Is there alignment between policies and …
In the next session at the AoIR 2025 conference I was part of an excellent roundtable on data access organised by Fabio Giglietto and featuring Jessica Yarin Robinson, Josephine Lukito, Richard Rogers, and me, which of course I didn’t blog; for the first post-lunch session I’m in a session on strategies and tactics that starts with Leandro Augusto Borges Lima. His focus is on the Mexican band The Warning, which consists of three sisters from Monterrey; through playing the video game Rock Band they became interested in rock’n’roll and went viral when they posted a Metallica cover on YouTube in …
The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Dan Angus, presenting our work on AI chatbots’ responses to conspiracist ideation. Ai chatbots are now widely used by everyday users; this is leading to a range of problematic outcomes, as people are being drawn into deep emotional relationships with such chatbots, for instance. Chatbots are also increasingly manipulated to represent distinct ideological perspectives.
What happens, then, when chatbots are asked specifically about conspiracy theories? What guardrails and safety mechanisms, if any, are in place in leading …
The third presenter in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Shupei Yuan, whose interest is in the way that AI chatbots influence risk perception and decision making during times of crisis. In some such crises, such as natural disasters, people might find out about the current situation via emergency alerts, but are perhaps unsure about the correct course of action to take. This requires a short-term decision-making process that deals with the immediate threat.
AI chatbots may be used in such contexts; the Red Cross had an AI chatbot called Clara during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, but …
The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Muira McCammon, whose focus is on AI chatbots, and particularly a chatbot called Stella, and its use in higher education. Unusually, this is a rule-based chatbot rather than a completely generative AI system. This and other chatbots are now also increasingly used by undergraduate students in higher education, and even embedded in university Websites; the implications of this still need to be understood.
Stella was brought onto campus at Tulane University in October 2023, unbeknownst to teaching staff themselves, and asks students two simple questions: how are you …
The next day at the the AoIR 2025 conference starts for me with a panel on AI imaginaries that begins with a paper by Giuliana Frascaria, whose interest is in cyborg imaginaries of the form that have been promoted by people like Mark Zuckerberg for some time. She has previously reviewed the literature and studied public attitudes towards these technologies, but this is limited by the fact that so few of these technologies already exist in the wild; this means that four the most part they remain futuristic imaginaries.
There are only some transhumanist pioneer communities that are early adopters …
The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is David Craig, whose focus is on Thai creator culture. Creator culture is now a worldwide phenomenon; these creators exist across multiple platforms within a complex transnational cultural industry and media ecology, but this still also has many diverse national and local forms.
Creators exist at the nexus between platforms, content, management, and community; this is inflected by the specific contexts of national imaginations, technonationalisms, and digital nationalism that configure differently in each country. There is also a kind of platform nationalism as national governments, media, tech, and users …
The second speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is Cara Wallis, whose interest is in feminist fansubbing (or femsubbing) in China. Young women in China who identify as feminists attempt to educate and encourage others in part through such fansubbing practices; some but not all of them identify as activists, and they form a loose online network pushing back against misogyny and male domination.
Fansubbing is one part of their practices: fandom is well understood as having the potential to lead to political participation since it is part of an active, agentive, and potentially resistant participatory culture …
The final session for this first full day at the AoIR 2025 conference is on online communities, and begins with Nina Duque, whose focus is on K-Pop fandom on YouTube in Quebec. Local francophone Quebecois teenage fangirls have embraced K-Pop, much like other fan communities around the world; this is even though K-Pop is of course a highly mass-produced and industrialised entertainment product.
Much of this is consumed via YouTube, and teenagers see this as much better than television because of the instant accessibility of K-Pop content; this meets a local participatory culture, and K-Pop thereby becomes a networked cultural …
The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard, shifting our focus to Taylor Swift fandom on Reddit. The first Swiftie subreddit was created in 2010, but such fandom has evolved and diversified considerably over the years; several new subreddits emerged especially in 2023 in response to Swift’s romance with NFL star Travis Kelce. The present paper examines this for a period from September 2023 to October 2024.
/r/TaylorSwift remains the largest of these subreddits, but the anti-fandom subreddit /r/travisandtaylor was particularly active as the romance intensified in mid-2024. A smaller group …
