Abstract Anthropologists and other scholarly authors are increasingly expected to disclose and describe their use of generative AI. In this commentary, we sketch emerging practices of AI disclosure and attribution, consider how these practices might be adapted to address anthropology's distinctive epistemic and ethical commitments, and recommend strategies for AI disclosure that build on existing norms in anthropological publishing. Looking beyond publishers’ policies, we also examine how the expectation to disclose AI use is being codified across scales and sectors, contextualizing anthropologists’ decision‐making with respect to relevant trends in other regulatory and professional domains.
Abstract This commentary examines the relationship between First Nations’ knowledge, AI, and cultural appropriation from the perspective of an Indigenous scholar and journal editor. The author highlights the potential conflicts between who controls AI and First Nations sovereignty. For this author, the question of who controls a technology is more important than its inherent nature.
Abstract How is artificial intelligence altering our understandings of academic authorship? While the uptake of AI might appear to require a radical revisioning of our notions of authorship, in fact, it highlights long‐standing notions of collective and individual authorial responsibility, as demonstrated through the first human engagements with the ELIZA computer program. Pitched in the 1960s as AI capable of engaging in psychoanalytic interviews, ELIZA illuminates the necessary give‐and‐take between authors and their interlocutors. Employing M. M. Bakhtin's notion of answerability, I suggest, enables us to examine the dual sides of authorship that ELIZA and more recent forms of AI reveal: as engagement in a call‐and‐response (between author and audience) and as a form of accountability. Drawing from my experiences as the editor‐in‐chief of American Ethnologist , I examine AI's impact on the collective and individualized nature of academic authorship today.
Abstract This commentary examines how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes scholarly authorship through Fredrik Barth's figures of the guru and the conjurer. The guru instructs within moral and scholarly frameworks, while the conjurer mystifies through spectacle. AI embodies both roles: promoted by publishers like Wiley as a guru offering clarity and scope, it performs more like a conjurer, producing dazzling outputs that obscure their origins and evade critical debate. Examining an AI‐generated submission to The Australian Journal of Anthropology ( TAJA ), we use these figures as heuristic tools to highlight contrasting modes of knowledge transmission. By collapsing them, AI creates a new opposition, guru‐conjurer versus educator, in which authority rests on performance rather than reflexive pedagogy, and the desire for guidance eclipses critical engagement. Such systems bypass the intellectual struggle with concepts central to scholarship. When normalized by major publishers, AI‐driven spectacle reshapes expectations of authorship, expertise, and knowledge itself.
Abstract Shortly after Super Bowl LX, in which Bad Bunny headlined the most‐watched halftime show in Super Bowl history, the editors of American Ethnologist sat down to interview anthropologists Crystal Abidin (author of books including TikTok and Youth Cultures and Child Influencers: How Children Become Entangled with Social Media Fame ) and Vanessa Díaz (author of the books Manufacturing Celebrity and P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance ). The wide‐ranging discussion covered the changing structures of celebrity promotion, including Hollywood paparazzi and J‐pop and K‐pop fan clubs, genres of parasociality and shifting social media trends, the rise of influencers and new pathways to achieving and marketing celebrity, and the performances of child influencers. Even though they work in different regions of the world and study different celebrity industries, both Díaz and Abidin focus on what and who are made invisible in the production of celebrity, and the ways that pop culture icons from minority groups have achieved global mainstream success by coding forms of critique and political commentary within catchy tunes.
