In our future world, we have no way of telling how things would be. We don’t know whether we will be fighting one another in some zombie apocalypse or even if we will be driving in flying cars from one point to another. So sometimes to guess the future, humanity often depict their predictions and such in the media that we consume. Popular culture to this day is modern popular culture transmitted via the mass media, this could be through anything, via books, film, TV, music and so forth.
One of the things we look at in Future Cultures (BCM325) is how technology is depicted and how it will be in our future. Part of this is for us to create a digital artefact exploring our own interests that relate back to how technology will be within the next 5, 10, 15 years and so forth.
I decided pretty quickly I wanted to explore how future AI is depicted through our popular culture. Majority of our perceptions of AI has already been shaped by pop culture, because in the current day, complete AI is something that doesn’t exist. But majority of the time, pop culture limits the stereotype of AI in a negative perception. Turning on the creator (being humans) and more often than not – wanting to have rule over humans.
Initially I had hoped to publish 3 short research pieces with some history of AI in popular culture with examples. This including other research done on the topic. I had hoped that after these 3 written articles I could then translate this research into short YouTube videos – this in order to appeal to wider audiences.
Unfortunately, it did not work out that way as most things do not. I had written an article relating some examples with AI and its depiction however, it just was not something I was interested in. I found that it dragged on and was not engaging with an audience. I wanted to create something that allowed audiences to be interested but not feel like they were completing a chore by reading it. So here, I transferred my DA onto the platform TikTok. I decided I would post multiple one minute videos that explore some research and depictions of AI in our pop cultures.
My TikTok account can be found via the app and username amcdesigns, or via browser through the link, https://www.tiktok.com/@amcdesigns?lang=en .
I had begun to post videos and had a few by the time I had to post my beta video for my DA. They were all one minuet long, clips from the example with me speaking over the clip – to avoid copyright issues. My initial video had a scene from the film iRobot, which shortly had been muted after due copyrighted content. I learnt quickly that the easiest way to avoid this, was to mute all the audio from the videos and then just speak over the examples. I did not find this hard because I felt as explored in my beta, that possibly the one minuet was not enough to cover enough ground for each example. I had not been referencing the course content as much, but in my later videos, I was able to look a lot into our class exploration of AI, cyberspace, and cybernetics to help me find useful research and materials to refence in my videos, for example in my last video I speak about George Dvorsky and his work for promoting AI.
As I had spoken about in my beta, I found audience engagement low, which was disheartening but overall I was still trying to have the use of hashtags in my posts and was even following hashtags to interact with other users posting about similar things for example, I was in a large discussion with a creator about some of the audio animatronics at the latest Disneyland (for side information – this is a spiderman animatronic who swings around 20 meters in the air and moves whilst in the air, which is off topic but still really awesome).
Suddenly, whilst I was receiving no comments and little likes (a common incident on TikTok) I had a large jump of views in my videos from around 20, to some even being over 400 views. So this was quite rewarding and I felt like I was actually catering to an audience with my videos.
As I am writing this, due to these view counts, I have also been given early access from TikTok for 3-minute videos, which would have been much more useful at the time of making my videos, so the timing of that was quiet frustrating but I’ll keep note of it for future DA’s!
I believe that on reflection with the assistance on some comments on my Beta blog post and from myself, I think I would have done my videos possibly on Instagram Reels with a shorter version on TikTok. This would have expanded my platform presence and also would allow me to have longer times for my videos, so they were not rushed to force the content into the video as much. I possibly could have even refined my topic more by sticking to 1 type of popular culture, so it was more niche rather than looking at all kinds of media.
Considering the future, Artificial Intelligent beings will be coming to our world, it is impossible to think they will not. Personally, I believe they will be arriving much sooner than later. From all the popular culture I have explored, a large majority has humanity declining this change and treating AI as lesser than themselves. I think individuals really need to consider if this is how it will be? I really enjoyed looking into this digital artefact topic and overall have thoroughly enjoyed the subject BCM325 as it is something quite different than what I have done in all of my education.
Till next time,
Alex
AMC Blogs 