Abstract This commentary examines propaganda driven by artificial intelligence ( AI ) in China using a case study of the adoption of AI by its state media in coverage about the Two Sessions – plenary meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference held annually in Beijing. It calls for a rethinking of digital authoritarianism in the AI era by prioritizing the relationship between authoritarianism and AI technology companies. The authors argue that AI propaganda and digital authoritarianism should be understood as global phenomena, rather than as practices that are exclusive to authoritarian regimes. They also advocate the use of more nuanced, comparative, relational, and multifaceted approaches to examine emerging forms of AI -driven ‘authoritarian tendencies’, such as AI -driven propaganda, in various political contexts, and to critically analyze their practices, power structures, and social impacts.
Abstract Serious games ( SG s) are purpose-driven digital games designed primarily for learning and training outcomes rather than entertainment. SG s are widely used in disaster education, but few achieve sustained use and long-term adoption. Therefore, assessing current research on disaster-related SG s is crucial to identify strategies that support their sustainability. This review identifies the technologies and techniques used by 42 successfully launched SG s. This analysis highlights the need to combine gamified applications with structured teaching to improve disaster education. Our findings show that SG s are more likely to succeed when developed using robust testing and release frameworks. Success also depends on cross-platform compatibility, continuous engagement, social learning, emerging technologies, and effective promotion. However, few SG s are designed for long-term sustainability, and limited integration of land use and the built environment reduces users’ spatial understanding of disasters. Our findings directly support SDG s 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and 13 (Climate Action).
Abstract This article explores the impact of softfakes generated using artificial intelligence ( AI ) – softened or idealized images of political figures – on discussions related to Indonesia’s presidential election campaign in 2024. Through a combined analysis of computational text and critical discourse, this paper examines over 140,000 YouTube comments about Prabowo Subianto’s gemoy (being cute and adorable) branding strategy. The study shows that softfakes played a key role in changing Prabowo’s image from a stern figure to someone more relatable, expanding viral activity and division in online discussions. In contrast to deepfakes, which are deceptive, softfakes manipulate images in plain sight, in this case to sway voter sentiment, signalling a transition from covert disinformation to a campaign overtly focused on entertainment. Our research enhances prior studies about synthetic media and digital populism, emphasizing the subtle power of visual manipulation, which, despite being obvious, shapes democratic engagement and voter choices.
This article explores the aesthetics of artificial intelligence (Al) images by analyzing three cases: Patrik Schumacher's design experiment through the use of text-to-image Al tools (2023), Refik Anadol's Seoul Haemong (2019) and Yiyun Kang's Geofuture (2022-2023), all of which use Zaha Hadid Architects' Dongdaemun Design Plaza as a referent or a background. While Schumacher uses Al as a design method, Anadol and Kang focus on interactivity through outdoor Al exhibitions, which assume lively interaction between their works and visitors but loosely grapple with its elusive nature. They present a flattened sense of the world in which the lived experiences and scattered visual data from daily lives are reassembled and epigenetically generate new affects, percepts, and moods. By regarding Bruno Latour's postcritical stance and Catherine Malabou's concept of plasticity as thresholds, the article encourages us to rethink Al images as nonhuman assemblages that consist of forms of life and evolving technologies.
This paper is an exploratory study on major global subscription-based video-on-demand (SVOD) platforms (Prime Video, Netflix, and Disney+), which performs a data-driven analysis of each platform's catalogue in five active Asian markets (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) and examines their contents over time and across space. To support catalogue-based, exhaustive quantitative research, we propose a technical framework and present various results, in particular, those related to overlap between regions and platforms and license duration, as the first step towards a systematic and standardized approach to looking at SVOD platforms that links media studies and digital humanities. Pursuing projects similar to this one and leveraging Semantic Web principles could facilitate similar research in the future; here, we discuss the numerous obstacles that currently hinder it.
This article examines the Japanese government's narrative about artificial intelligence (AI) from 2021 to 2024, focusing on how the government framed AI, the evolution of this framing, and whether Japan's narrative aligns with prior research on the topic. The analysis relies on official documents and Diet discussions by the two cabinets under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during this period. Our results indicate frequent use of the narrative of AI as an inevitable, disruptive technology subject to international competition, as noted in previous literature. However, Japan has also developed unique AI narratives, emphasizing its openness to AI, a desire to lead in writing international regulations, and a preference for light regulation that does not hinder progress. AI is also seen as a potential solution to the challenge of an ageing and shrinking population. However, awareness of the risks has also grown over time, in particular concerning copyright and disinformation issues.
The Indian health-care system, characterized by decreasing public funding and a rapidly increasing number of private health-care facilities, has awakened to the role of artificial intelligence (Al) - efforts are underway for aggregating innovations within a digital health architecture. Analyzing the emerging narrative around `smart' wearable gadgets, healthtech platforms, and their chatbots, this article investigates the paradigm of wellness predicated upon tracking-based self-governance. It establishes that Al amplifies the suboptimal but continuous process in wellness, as opposed to traditional health care focused on addressing unfortunate medical events. While exploring the broader implications of the digital health architecture, the article argues that much of the enthusiasm about Al chatbots and wellness apps is not due to the quality of health-care support but, rather, to widespread curiosity about an always-on support system, which has not yet translated into the sort of triumph that the Indian state and venture capital are trying to attain.
This article examines the AI imaginary through visual culture. New media artists in East Asia utilize technologies such as 3D modelling and rendering, computer vision, motion capture, and facial motion capture in their practices. Drawing on Benjamin's notion of `aura', Marx's theory of `alienation', and posthumanism theories, the paper examines the self-referential critiques on unchecked digital capitalism that both liberate and exploit the human body and labour. It first examines Cao Fei's vision of a futuristic metropolis where cyborgs make humans obsolete. It then illustrates computer vision algorithms and motion capture techniques' alienation of humans from their bodies, labour, experience, and environment in Fei Jun and Lu Yang's works. Finally, analyzing Japanese and Korean examples, the paper further discusses how new media art reveals the paradox of AI and other automated technologies that simultaneously enable and constrain, offering a critical perspective on AI's promise and peril in rapidly digitizing societies.
This article explores different approaches to AI in media such as Japanese animation, which is globally influential, though understudied in this context. Focusing on manga-based and original AI-related animation, I study five animations in more detail out of 30 that are analyzed to facilitate future research. Astroboy (1980) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) are influential works in the industry, and more modern works that emerged in the latest trend of AI in the sociocultural context, such as Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song (2021), Gene ofAr (2023), and Pluto (2023), are examined in greater detail. This is done to enable a comparison in the AI representation between the initial examples of anime and the most works. These imaginaries tend to balance the tendency towards works imbued with the Frankenstein complex against more positive AIs in later representations, using these characters to explore questions about humanity, emotions, and the AI's potential.
This introduction to the Asiascape: Digital Asia special issue on AI imaginaries in Asia discusses how people imagine the role of technology in their societies. It reviews how scholarship has made sense of such `social imaginaries' and their relevance before proposing that research move beyond dominant epistemologies and socio-technical imaginaries to examine Asia as a site for technological innovation and alternative futures. It asks how actors from the region - so often cast in American and European fantasies about technology as the exotic `Other' - envision their own AI futures. The article offers an overview of the ten contributions to this special issue and concludes with an appeal for policy makers and practitioners to engage with local narratives, affective expectations, and value systems that are rooted in specific language and cultural contexts so that they can better engage with users, particularly those who need help the most.
It is well known that Tezuka Osamu's Astro Boy influenced not only popular culture but also the industrial and academic interest in robotics. In contrast, less attention is paid to artificial intelligence (AI) in Tezuka's works. Tezuka gives AI a starkly different role and personality from robots, depicting it negatively and not seeing the humanity in AI characters. Despite this, more than 30 years after his death, a posthumous work released in 2020 titled Phaedo was deemed a `new work by Tezuka Osamu'. How did this happen? This article traces the history of the concept of robots and AI in Japan, contextualizes Tezuka's representation of robots and AI and argues that the technological breakthrough since Tezuka's death has successfully distanced in the contemporary imagination of AI from how Tezuka conceptualized it.
In China's rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) landscape, AI imaginaries, the collective visions and narratives that shape how AI is conceptualized and integrated into society, play a crucial role in defining gender representation. Digital entities and humanoid robots dominate social media, reinforcing cultural ideals. Often hyper-feminized, these AI constructs reflect and shape societal expectations of femininity, reinforcing traditional gender norms while also sparking crucial discussions about gender and technology. Their portrayal highlights the intersection of gender with technology, influencing public perceptions and interactions. These AI entities raise significant ethical questions about the objectification and commodification of the female form in the digital age. By blurring the lines between humans and machines, they challenge existing gender dynamics and demand a re-examination of the role of gender in a rapidly digitizing society. These constructs are not only technological tools but pivotal elements in the ongoing negotiation of social identity and gender relations.
This article looks at an important but as-yet underexplored aspect of artificial intelligence (AI) imaginaries in digital Asiascapes: disability. It performs a preliminary and exploratory analysis of disability in Asian AI imaginaries, revealing tensions and issues and raising questions for future research, policy consideration, and debate. It argues, first, that disability is an important component of AI imaginaries in Asia, in that AI imaginaries draw on Asian disability identities and representations but also shape them; and, second, that power - in ongoing struggles over the power relations of disability versus its slow social transformation - affects the ability of diverse interested actors to create and contest different imaginaries, something that might play out differently in Asian and inter-Asian contexts than elsewhere. In doing so, this article shines a spotlight on how the politics of disability meets the politics of AI in Asian imaginaries, with profound implications for social, cultural, and economic life.
Since 2021, the global `Year of the Metaverse', the Chinese government has appeared more proactive than its tech giants, treating the metaverse as both a new economic growth engine and a chance to enhance global leadership. Over the past three years, authorities at all levels have issued numerous policies aimed at fostering domestic metaverse industries while maintaining regulatory control. This study systematically reviews these policies, revealing a notable level of ambiguity, inconsistency, and complexity-characterized as localism in China's digital policymaking. By paying particular attention to how AI is positioned in China's multi-tiered regulatory constructs of the metaverse-a futurist landscape driven by a web of interconnected innovations-this study highlights that dynamic central-local relationships contribute to variegated AI imaginaries in China. This localism perspective sheds light on how subnational and smaller-scale stakeholders, though often overlooked, still play crucial roles in shaping global socio-technical imaginaries.
This commentary points out two interrelated forces that have reshaped platform studies: the rise of digital China and the disruptive impact of frontier technologies, particularly artificial intelligence (AI). By foregrounding alternative imaginaries, such as the bamboo grove, and expanding the analytical axes of platform studies, this commentary calls for a better appreciation of and deeper engagement with alternative and emerging epistemologies. It proposes scholarly attention not only to content, code, chip, or policy, but how platformized flows connect and disconnect, and to what ends; and asking: not "what do platforms do?" but "what world do they build, for whom, and how?"
This article examines the generative artificial intelligence (AI) boom amid China's internet industry downturn through AI imaginaries produced by both Chinese inter-net entrepreneurs and workers. By analyzing entrepreneurs' public speeches, tech worker interviews, and online AI-related gossip, this article describes three conceptual tools for exploring these intersecting and competing imaginaries: AI manifestos articulated by entrepreneurs to legitimize technocentric visions, AI strategies developed by workers based on labour-oriented concerns, and AI satire contesting big tech's authority in shaping social imaginaries with subversive humour. China's internet industry is a unique stage on which multiple AI imaginaries play out, providing a lens for examining the power geometry at work in the formation of imaginaries. Contextualized in China's internet industry, this article contributes to the study of AI imaginaries by investigating how the technological visions of AI are continuously reworked, debated, and contested in the interaction between two conflicting, yet intertwined, social classes.
This research investigates how Indonesian Muslim philanthropic organizations strengthen the sense of umma (a united Muslim community) through online philanthropy. We analyze online campaigns from five key organizations: ACT, BAzr1AS, Dompet Dhuafa, LazisMu, and LazisNU, examining approximately 51,000 social media posts, particularly on Instagram and Kitabisa, Indonesia's leading charitable crowd- funding platform. By generating word clouds, we analyze their campaigns' discourses, revealing their ideologies of aid and user responses. The findings indicate that these organizations primarily emphasize their religious identity to mobilize Islamic charitable funds. The ACT case notably stands out for its strong umma emphasis, especially in campaigns related to conflict areas like Palestine and Rohingya. Despite the internet's potential to connect Muslims globally and the usual success of umma campaigns, we argue that Indonesian Muslims face multiple realities and have multiple identities leading to fluid socialities in online philanthropy.
