What is the discourse around AI use in media and how does it differ between companies, artists, audiences, and cultural organizations? To what extent or how are marginalized media archives using AI? What can we learn about the current AI hype by revisiting internet history? How are workers organizing to protect their creative rights? These are the questions CLCF research assistants are investigating through a series of exciting mapping projects. The outputs of these projects will be available on the CLCF website in the fall 2025 and winter 2026. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak at the ongoing research!

Media industries, artists, and fans are grappling with rapidly changing regulations, use cases, and experiments of AI use in media. As a result, we see a range of perspectives and projects that speak to the possibilities and concerns of AI in this industry. Over the past 4 months we have been collecting and qualitatively analyzing a range of news sources to map this discourse. Utilizing a few key case studies as central topics of analyses (ex. The Brutalist, Uncanny Valley, Drake, Fortnite) our sources address AI use in film, television, music, and video games. We are continuing to collect sources as new publications emerge daily.

At this stage, we have generated a video about the current state of our qualitative coding and AI mapping, which was distributed on multiple social media platforms:

We are also currently working on an AI Media Mapping Report document which will address key concepts and quotes across our sources and examples. We plan to generate future articles as we continue to map evolving AI technologies in media. Stay tuned for more to come!

How is AI being used by marginalized media archives, or how is it not being used?

So far, this mapping is more a story of AI absence than of AI integration. While larger media archives in Canada, like the NFB (National Film Board), are applying machine learning in their archival work to generate metadata for the films in their collections, these technologies are less accessible to marginalized media archives due to their technical capacity, ethics, and systemic funding challenges.

Currently informed by a literature review of academic scholarship and industry best practices, as well as interviews with marginalized media archives like the ArQuives, and VUCAVU, we will be continuing this mapping into the fall. We will also be developing this research into a chapter for the upcoming Archives in/en Action book, supporting its rationale for a National Action Plan that will advocate for sectoral change in marginalized media archives.

A technology that changed the world forever, completely redefined work, and led to a whole lot of new opportunities and problems: the Internet. (Did you think I was going to say Generative AI?)

In this mapping project, we are cataloguing important dates in the development of the Internet and other communications technologies from around the world. This research is crucial to expand our traditional narrative of the Internet (i.e. white guy in a garage). Through the historiographic timeline and infographic-style visualizations, we will demonstrate chronologies, commonalities, and differences in previous and current technological and programmatic developments in Canada, Brazil, China, and other countries involved in CLCF. The map will be open source, and we will also publish an annotated bibliography to help people learn more. Stay tuned!

Around the world, workers in cultural and creative industries – broadly understood as the arts, culture, and media sectors – are negotiating the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the workplace. In response to AI, workers are advocating, striking, protesting, and mobilizing to protect their creative freedom and workers’ rights. Through manifestos, policy recommendations, collective agreements, and community, workers’ groups like Hollywood writers, game performers in the US, and voice actors in Brazil, are organizing to preserve the integrity of artistic practices and creative industries.

We are building a tracker, as part of the Worker-led AI governance research under the Creative Labour and Critical Futures cluster. It aims to inform workers around the world about the state of mobilizations and negotiations around AI in the cultural sector. Despite the challenges of covering a large global landscape, this tracker aims to broaden the conversation beyond North America to create a more widely informed perspective by bringing awareness and insights to the global conversation happening within the industry. This tool serves communities and community members, like media professionals and cultural workers, who share similar interests by highlighting workers’ voices and providing greater visibility for collective action. The tracker is planned to be launched in the Fall 2025.

How are Canadian culture organizations grappling with generative AI? Starting with Toronto’s cultural ecosystem, this project traces the conversations, anxieties, and opportunities emerging as institutions from film archives to music venues confront AI’s disruptive potential. We turn a curious eye to how these organizations are simultaneously trying to harness AI’s possibilities while wrestling with its implications for the workers, artists, and communities they serve.

Our methodology involves identifying cultural organizations actively engaged in AI discourse, then systematically documenting and coding their positions using established frameworks. The scope of our project expands from Toronto to Ontario and then nationally, culminating in a comprehensive briefing document that maps the key players, institutional dynamics, funding ecosystems, and emerging controversies. This work feeds into SSHRC-funded PDG “IA (re)générative pour la culture: acteurs, controverses et devenir des politiques à travers la francophonie Canadienne,” a larger collaborative investigation of regenerative AI policies across Canadian francophone contexts, offering crucial insights into how different cultural and linguistic communities navigate the intersection of AI and cultural work. Rather than focusing solely on the technological novelty of AI, this research examines what remains stubbornly unchanged about cultural labor and institutional power, and what that means for the future of cultural production in Canada.