Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
With the roll-out of artificial intelligence tools (AI) in all areas of the media industries, there is a growing need for scholarly analysis of the ways systems of automation, predictive analytics, and recommendation are transforming film, television, gaming, music, and other forms of digital entertainment. Media scholars have already begun to conduct important research in this area. AI tools such as Showrunner AI, Deep Editor, Respeecher, and Runway Gen-3 are transforming the production of media content and the roles of creative workers from actors, cinematographers, and editors to sound designers and makeup artists. There is a long history of technological change in the entertainment industries, but the current conjecture has brought sudden and dramatic transformations that demand investigation by media industry and technology scholars.
The Carsey-Wolf Center (CWC) at UC Santa Barbara is assembling a team of academic researchers for a new initiative on Media Industries and AI led by Professors Jennifer Holt, Ross Melnick, and Lisa Parks. In the past, the CWC has led major media industry research initiatives resulting in white papers, conferences, and books such as: Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming and Sharing Media in the Digital Age (ed. by Jennifer Holt & Kevin Sanson); Distribution Revolution (ed. by Michael Curtin, Jennifer Holt, & Kevin Sanson); and Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor (ed. by Michael Curtin & Kevin Sanson). During the current period, we will support research that studies the relationship between media industries and AI from a wide range of perspectives and methodologies.
photo credit: Kier in Sight Archives
Research Areas
Production: How are uses of AI tools by media industry creatives altering production processes, narrative, and content creation? Which tools and software are currently used by creatives, and which are in development? What does the workflow now look like, and what are the critical impacts on storytelling and creativity?
Labor: How are work roles changing in the media industries in the context of AI tools (for screenwriters and showrunners as well as directors, voiceover artists, animators, production designers, and studio admin work)? Which positions are becoming obsolete? What kind of new jobs are emerging? How are creative workers and unions negotiating these processes? What kind of workers or roles will be needed in the next 5-10 years?
Markets and Audience Behavior: How are AI tools being used on the backends of streaming platforms to conduct audience and market analysis, or to “engineer” audiences for certain types of content? How is the function of ratings changing in the context of AI? What emergent measurement systems and metrics are being used to assess the “success” of content?
Distribution and Exhibition: How is AI being used by companies like Netflix, Amazon, and YouTube to engineer consumer platform personalization and algorithmic delivery of entertainment and information content? What are the effects of these processes on development, content creation, politics, and culture? How are AI systems impacting the sharing of information and content, and/or the licensing of broadcast series/shows and theatrical exhibition strategies?
Intellectual Property and the Law: How is the use of AI tools interwoven with copyright intellectual property issues? What kinds of licensing agreements are emerging? What is the status of lawsuits filed by content owners? We seek research projects that include these and/or other inquiries related to the effects of AI on media industries and the law.
Industry Dynamics: Which companies are the major players in this emerging space? Are they in Hollywood / Silicon Valley? What kind of conglomeration/concentration is happening across these sectors relative to AI? Who is maintaining or gaining power and why? What independent companies have emerged and gained power or been acquired? What emergent or new infrastructure is required to support AI in the media industries?
Regulation, Ethics, and Public Policy: What are regulators doing about AI technologies nationally or internationally that may impact the media industries? How do pending copyright lawsuits involve and/or relate to media industries? How is public policy tracking, falling behind, and/or attempting to impact the use of AI within media industries?
Initiative Conveners
Jennifer Holt
Jennifer Holt is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies and a former Fellow with the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. Her courses at UCSB include Media Criticism, Media Historiography, Television History, Media Industries, and The Future of Media. Her current research focuses on digital media policy and cloud infrastructures.
She is the author of Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024) and Empires of Entertainment (Rutgers, 2011). Holt is also the co-editor of Distribution Revolution; Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming & Sharing Media in the Digital Age; and Media Industries: History, Theory, Method. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Cinema Journal, Journal of Information Policy, Moving Data, and Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. She is also a co-founder of the open-access Media Industries journal.
Ross Melnick
Ross Melnick is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara and Interim Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center. He was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for his book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (Columbia University Press, 2022), which was awarded the 2024 Culbert Family Book Prize from the International Association for Media and History and the 2023 Richard Wall Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. He is the author of American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry (CUP, 2012)—recipient of the 2013 “Book of the Year” award from the Theatre Historical Society of America—co-editor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (AFI/Routledge, 2018), and co-author of Cinema Treasures (MBI, 2004), inspired by the website (cinematreasures.org) he co-founded 25 years ago. His research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, The Moving Image, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in numerous other journals and edited collections on film exhibition, media industries, silent cinema, broadcasting history, and film music.
Lisa Parks
Lisa Parks is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at UC Santa Barbara. A media historian and theorist, her research examines the cultural, political, and social dimensions of digital technologies and infrastructures, with emphases on global networks, satellite systems, and datafication processes. Her work has influenced critical approaches to media technologies and their societal impacts.
Parks is the author or co-editor of eight books, including Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and Sociotechnical Relations (University of Illinois Press, 2023), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (University of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers University Press, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2002), as well as more than 100 scholarly articles and chapters. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, she previously served as Professor of Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies at MIT (2016–2020).
Currently, Parks is co-leading new research collaborations on AI and the media industries supported by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the UC Humanities Research Institute. She served on the committee to re-envision UCSB’s Center for Information Technology and Society to foreground AI, and was recently invited to present at UNESCO’s 2025 “AI and the Future of Education” conference.