The limited horizon: Corporate artificial intelligence and the new monopoly on how communications and cultural work is done

Author Identifier

Andrew Hutcheon: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8790-6195

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture

Publisher

Intellect

School

School of Arts and Humanities

Comments

Hutcheon, A. (2022). The limited horizon: Corporate artificial intelligence and the new monopoly on how communications and cultural work is done. Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, 13(2), 187-203. https://doi.org/10.1386/iscc_00060_1

Abstract

Corporate messaging around generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the communications and culture domain focuses upon the reduced labour and democratization of creativity that supposedly comes with the adoption of these systems. From this emerges a dominant narrative that glorifies the productivity benefits of AI adoption, such as how copywriters can facilitate the creation of more copy by querying ChatGPT and proofing its output rather than writing everything from scratch. This article focuses on an underreported element of this narrative, which is how AI companies are changing the underlying structures of these types of creative tasks and remoulding them in the image of modern bureaucracy. This argument follows the work of David Graeber on meaningless labour, where increasingly the system of the world is founded upon the propagation of busy work. Similarly, I draw upon the work of Ivan Illich on ‘radical monopoly’, where he proposes that the most dangerous monopoly is not the economic one that companies such as OpenAI overtly seek but instead identifies the monopoly over how things are done as the more significant hazard. Together, these conceptual frames plot out a unique institutional critique of AI as it is currently sold. This article demonstrates how this is already affecting practice in communications professions and culture industries while also theorizing upon possible ways forward using Graeber and Illich’s counterstrategies to modern institutional monopoly.

DOI

10.1386/iscc_00060_1

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