Artificial Intelligence

For the post-lunch session on this third day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore I’m in a session on mis- and disinformation infrastructures, where I’ll start by discussing our platform audit of how artificial intelligence chatbots respond to queries about well-known conspiracy theories. Here are the slides:

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Peichi Chung, whose focus is on digital labour in the context of e-sports. This is a rapidly growing area of digital entertainment, with an inaugural e-sports Olympics to be held in Dubai in 2027.

Past work on e-sports has focussed on e-sports as fan-based digital labour, and linked this to emerging worker identities in the gig economy. This is further disrupted by the rise of artificial intelligence and its embedding into video games, and the gamification of digital work; overall, video gaming becomes a form of …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Byron Hauck, who begins by asking whose imaginaries for artificial intelligence we are dealing with. Right now, we are being told what AI is: we are in the middle of the technological sublime – we are given a story of what it is supposed to be, what its future is supposed to be, what we are supposed to do with it.

But these visions are not empowering: they allow the current moment to be defined by a handful of capitalist tech leaders, rather than by the …

I’m starting my third day at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore with a panel on the political economy of AI, which starts with Benedetta Brevini. Attention to artificial intelligence has increased substantially in recent years, of course, and so has concern about the political economy of AI – with a growing focus also on the environmental impact of AI technologies and services. The massive environmental impact of artificial intelligence has now been recognised much more clearly.

This is a conversation that can no longer be avoided; it has produced substantial coverage in media, reports, and other documentation, and there …

The third speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Maham Sufi, whose focus is on misinformation and deepfakes in Pakistan. Deepfakes are AI-generated synthetic media, and their realism creates a substantial potential for audiences to be misinformed; however, image manipulation has long been a feature of political misinformation well before the emergence of AI image generation technologies.

Pakistan represents a hybrid regime with weak political parties that rely on the support of other elements of the establishment – not least the military. Image manipulation has a history here, directed at various leading politicians; this has …

The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting on the methodology of our ongoing analysis of climate coverage in the Australian media. This explores patterns of polarisation within journalistic content, but polarisation is not particularly well-defined in the literature, so we have developed the concept of destructive polarisation as an approach to defining when polarisation becomes problematic.

There is no clear information on how polarised the Australian media landscape is. Therefore, this project examines climate change coverage across some 26 Australian news outlets from the mainstream to the …

And the final speaker in this entertaining session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Junbin Su, whose interest is in algorithmic gatekeeping in AI news recommendations. What values guide such gatekeeping decisions?

Conventional journalistic gatekeeping reflects editorial decisions about news values, and a number of competing lists of such news values have been proposed over the decades. Algorithmic gatekeeping may build on these values, or introduce others – not least also linked to platform metrics like user engagement or shareworthiness. This might under- or overemphasise certain news values.

This study explored this by identifying some 100 news recommender …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Timothy Koskie, looking for media pluralism in AI-generated local news. But actually, these systems are not necessarily artificial intelligence in the full sense of the term: they are simply content generators. These systems feed on media content, and will make mistakes as they do so; this is not necessarily all that different from human-driven news media, however.

But how do AI content generators fit into the media ecosystem? Can they contribute to media pluralism, and thereby increase the media ecosystem’s health? If so, this could considerably …

The next speakers in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore are Jiawei Dai and Mengyao Liu, whose interest is in human perceptions of AI. These are often shaped in a socialised manner: different cognitive frameworks will affect how people perceive AI, and what relationships they form with AI technologies. Heuristic processing provides one explanation for this: this focusses on easily noticeable and understandable cues.

Users might perceive AI chatbots as human-like, and engage with them accordingly; in fact, there are lower social expectations about how AIs might react to human users, and humans might therefore engage in …

The first full session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore starts for me with a session on algorithmic media, which kicks off with Susanne Eichner. She notes the impact of digitisation on the fragmentation, individualisation, personalisation, and automation of media and users; this has led to research in critical data studies (focussing on the datafication of users and the surveillance capitalism that results from it), as well as in more user-oriented approaches that also acknowledge users’ datafied agency and resistance to such datafication.

How might we bridge these two seemingly opposed logics that variously see audiences as helpless or …