Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
photo credit: Kier in Sight Archives
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 has assembled a team of academic researchers for a new initiative on Media Industries and AI led by Professors Jennifer Holt, Ross Melnick, and Lisa Parks. The initiative has funded fourteen groundbreaking projects from twenty-one scholars who represent universities in fifteen countries and three continents. Researchers will be meeting at UCSB in spring 2026 to discuss their work and then return in fall of 2027 to present their findings.
Please direct all Media Industries and AI Research Initiative inquiries to Graduate Student Researcher Kelsey Moore at kelseymoore@ucsb.edu.
Media Industries and AI Research Initiative launch event
On Saturday, October 25, the Center hosted a panel in celebration of the launch of the research initiative. The afternoon opened with remarks by Carsey-Wolf Center founding benefactor Dick Wolf (Wolf Entertainment). The panel featured Jennifer Howell (Deep Voodoo), Ian Krietzberg (Puck), Lisa Parks (Film and Media Studies, UCSB), Rick Rosen (WME Agency), and Elliot Wolf (Wolf Games). The moderator for the event was Ross Melnick (interim director of the Carsey-Wolf Center).
To learn more about launch panel guests, visit this page.
Funded projects
This project examines the critical engagement with artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the social media entertainment industry, focusing on two rapidly evolving sub-sectors: virtual influencers and micro-short dramas. Situated at the intersection of traditional media industries and platform- and mobile-native content creation, both sectors rely on skilled creative workers while being shaped by the technical affordances of mobile devices, platform algorithms, and intellectual property libraries. By investigating how AI tools are deployed in content production and distribution, the project investigates the politics of creativity, labour conditions, and the sociocultural (re)production of social media entertainment.
Lianrui Jia is a lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield’s School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations. She currently leads Weaving an AI Safety Net for UK and Canada, an UKRI-SSHRC research project on comparative AI policy mapping. Her research focuses on media policy and regulation, platform economics, and media financialization. Her works have been published in Social Media + Society, Internet Policy Review, Media, Culture and Society, and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. She serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Cultural Economy and the Journal of Digital Media and Policy.
Weixiang Wang is currently a teaching fellow at the School of International Studies, University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He has a PhD in Politics from the University of Nottingham. He has published on trending topics including wanghong (online influencers), wolf warrior diplomacy, and livestreaming. His research interests include China’s cyber nationalism, digital propaganda and the politics of digital (sub)culture.
Generative AI in music and podcasting is at once a problem, a promise, and a mobilizing discourse driving ideas about the “future” of the sound industries. Yet it is unclear whether competing visions of that future—from artists and podcasters who create sonic content, executives who promote it, streaming platforms that distribute audio, or users who experience it—are reconcilable. Through a comparative analysis of leading generative AI music and podcasting services, interviews with sound industry professionals, and a discursive analysis of industry texts about AI, our project explores how AI and machine learning are shaping the music and podcasting industries.
Jeremy Morris is Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture (2015) and Podcasting (2024), and is the co-editor of two collections (Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography with Eric Hoyt and Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps with Sarah Murray). He researches software, sound technologies, music, and podcasting. He is also part of a team building a center for humanistic inquiry into AI and uncertainty at UW-Madison.
Derek Johnson is Professor and Department Chair in Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (2013) as well as Transgenerational Media Industries: Adults, Children, and the Reproduction of Culture (2019).
This study examines the expanding power and conglomerative strategies of Big Tech companies and AI startups within the U.S. media industries. By tracing the investments, alliances, and products of firms ranging from Google, Netflix, and OpenAI to Respeecher and Midjourney, the project investigates how corporate consolidation and deregulation shape the development and deployment of AI tools across the media landscape. Through analysis of mergers, partnerships, and data monopolies, it explores how these dynamics restructure markets, labor relations, and media content. The research also considers how AI functions as a mechanism for rationalizing corporate concentration and generative media, confronting urgent questions about governance, inequality, and democratic accountability in digital capitalism.
Jennifer Holt is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies and a PI of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries and AI Research Initiative. She is a former Fellow with the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. Holt is the author of Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024) and Empires of Entertainment (Rutgers, 2011). She is also the co-editor of The SAGE Handbook of the Digital Media Economy; Distribution Revolution; Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming & Sharing Media in the Digital Age; and Media Industries: History, Theory, Method. She is a co-founder of the open-access journal Media Industries.
Lisa Parks is 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. Parks is the author or co-editor of eight books, including Media Backends: Digital Infrastructure and Sociotechnical Relations (University of Illinois Press, 2023) and Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (University of Illinois Press, 2015). A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Parks is a PI of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries and AI Research Initiative.
This project investigates how AI is used throughout the product suites of audience analytics firms, with particular attention to the adoption of synthetic data. Phase One of the research consists of developing a representative corpus of third-party television audience analytics companies, classifying their distinct specializations and foci, and mapping their varying applications of AI. In Phase Two, the team will analyze how these firms employ synthetic data to generate audiences, including how they construct so-called advanced audiences. This research will shed light on how the audience analytics industry is reframing audience identity and its implications for media culture at large.
Jennifer Hessler is an assistant professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book on the technological history of audience measurement and its coalescence with the computation industries is under contract with MIT Press. Her research appears in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Television & New Media, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, The Velvet Light Trap, Participations: Journal of Audience Reception Research, and elsewhere.
Film distribution and exhibition is rapidly making use of new AI tools for film booking, curation, and distribution; dynamic ticket pricing as well as marketing and audience personalization and analytics; theater operations, inventories, and efficiencies; as well as technological upgrades and deployment. Melnick will analyze companies like Vue Entertainment who are using AI for cinema scheduling across their theater chain, Regal Cinemas who are using AI for dynamic pricing strategies and audience personalization, and IMAX who recently partnered with Runway AI to screen AI-generated short films in their large format auditoria.
Ross Melnick is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Interim Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara. He is also a PI of the Carsey-Wolf Center’s Media Industries and AI Research Initiative. He was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for his most recent 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 and the 2023 Richard Wall Memorial Award. 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.
This research project investigates the harmonization of policies, digital infrastructure, and media industries in the era of AI. Using South Korea as a case study, it examines regulations governing AI and their impact on the Korean media industry. The interaction between platformization and AI continues to transform the media industry in such areas as dubbing and visual effects. Drawing on interdisciplinary research methods and interviews with policymakers and creative workers, this project explores critical issues that must be addressed in developing AI policies while fostering the growth and sustainability of the Korean media industry.
Benjamin M. Han is an associate professor in the Department of Entertainment and Media Studies at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America (Rutgers University Press, 2020); Reckoning with the World: South Korean Television and the Latin American Imaginary (Temple University Press, forthcoming 2025); and Beyond Squid Game: Korean Media and the Netflix Paradigm (University of Texas Press, forthcoming 2026). He is also the coeditor of Korean Pop Culture beyond Asia: Race and Reception (University of Washington Press, 2024).
The video game industry is at the forefront of AI adoption in both the broader mediascape globally, as well as a quintessential site for the entanglement of American Chinese stakeholders. Employing a mixed-method approach, this project thoroughly surveys AI use in the US and Chinese game industries and articulates how AI production logic reshapes the global game industry’s economic, creative, and regulatory power relations. The findings will show how AI is transforming how games are conceived, created, circulated, and controlled globally, while shedding new insight on the rules, attributes, and values of global media industries in the AI era.
Gejun Huang is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Communication at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. His research touches on the Chinese digital game industry, media entrepreneurship, cultural policy, and digital privacy. He has published articles centered on China’s gaming entrepreneurship and digital surveillance in Big Data & Society, Cultural Trends, International Journal of Communication, Chinese Journal of Communication, among others.
Lars de Wildt is an assistant professor in media and cultural industries at the Centre for Journalism and Media Studies, University of Groningen. He studies how videogames produce worldviews. His NWO Veni-project Reorienting Global Gaming, on how one of the largest cultural industries in the West will adapt to China, runs from 2024–2029. Lars has held (visiting) positions at the Universities of Leuven, Heidelberg, Montréal, Deakin, Bremen, Tampere, and Jyväskylä. For more, see larsdewildt.eu.
This project examines how U.S. media companies and trade organizations—and in particular the lawyers that work for them—are developing strategies (legal, contractual, managerial, and political) to respond to AI. More specifically, it asks: How are entertainment lawyers in the U.S. conceptualizing and (through lawsuits and the threats of lawsuits) realizing the legal frameworks through which AI will be adjudicated? Other than copyright, what areas of law are being mobilized by U.S. media companies and trade organizations to define the legal parameters of AI?
Gregory Steirer is a scholar of media industries and creative labor. He has published and taught courses on Hollywood, media law and regulation, the digital public sphere, media organizations, comic books, television, video games, and horror films. He is the author of The American Comic Book Industry and Hollywood, written with Alisa Perren, (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Legal Stories: Narrative-based Property Development in the Modern Copyright Era (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
We examine two contrasting contexts, Indonesia and Singapore, to investigate how AI-driven transformations exacerbate precarious media labor conditions in the Global South, highlighting local vulnerabilities and global inequities in the creative media economy. The project foregrounds two Southeast Asian perspectives: between a large, informal creative economy and a smaller, but highly regulated media ecosystem under capitalism. We focus on how AI intensifies precarity and reshapes professional identities across these sites and offers evidence-based recommendations for policymakers, educators, and media associations. With practitioners, we seek to co-develop a white paper that aims to advance worker-oriented guidelines in AI and media regulation.
Pei-Sze Chow is Assistant Professor in New Media and Digital Cultures at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. As a critical film and media scholar, her work focuses on social, cultural, and political issues impacting media labor in the cultural and creative industries, with a focus on Singapore and other Asian contexts. Her most recent work examining AI creativity and the impact of AI on the screen industries has appeared in AI & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies.
Yearry Panji Setianto is Assistant Professor at the Journalism Department, Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, Indonesia. He teaches communication theories and research methods, with research interests in media, politics, and society in Southeast Asia. His publications explore everyday digital media use, journalism–politics relations, and media’s role in shaping debates on technology and religion. His work appears in journals such as Southeast Asian Studies and the Journal of Media and Religion, and he has presented at AEJMC, IAMCR and AoIR. His current projects examine how datafication and AI reshape Indonesian media and political communication.
Hollywood labor unions and guilds have argued that generative AI poses a future threat to Hollywood workers, but current AI technologies have also made some creative and craft work more efficient and extended the technological toolkit. In many ways, far from an anthropomorphized threat but rather in its lower case and lower stakes version of automated technological processes, generative AI has been part of Hollywood craftworkers’ technologies for decades. Using interviews with a variety of creatives working in cinematography and post-production, I examine how Hollywood workers are currently grappling with its uses, usefulness, and impact on work.
Miranda Banks is Professor of Film, Television, and Media Studies at Loyola Marymount University. She is author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild (Rutgers 2009), and co-editor of two Production Studies books and Media Industries in Crisis: What COVID Unmasked (Routledge, 2009, 2015, 2024). Her co-authored book Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers will be published in April 2026 by University of California Press.
Intellectual property law at its foundation relies on the ability to clearly define concepts at the heart of film and television: creativity, authorship, expression, and humanity. In this important moment when A.I. technologies endlessly complicate those definitions, this project will monitor ongoing legal cases, contextualize current debates using archival legal research, and conduct extensive interviews with people in the media industry, the nonprofit sector, and in positions of government leadership to examine how the industry, the law, and our political leaders respond; how the law evolves in theory and practice; and what that means for the future of the media.
Jennifer Porst is an associate professor of media industry studies in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University. Her research focuses on the American media industries, the laws and regulations that govern their behaviors, and the texts they produce. She is the author of Broadcasting Hollywood: The Struggle Over Feature Films on Early TV and the co-editor of Very Special Episodes: Televising Industrial and Social Change (both Rutgers University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in leading journals and anthologies including Television & New Media, Film History, Routledge Companion to Media Industries, and Hollywood and the Law.
Our project advances R-Shief into a next-generation AI platform that produces dynamic visualizations and citational analyses to reveal how knowledge circulates across digital cultures. This new tool, Contrapuntal, transforms R-Shief into a social network of users who collaboratively share datasets, AI-generated visualizations, and “data stories,” linking humanistic critique with machine learning. At its core, the platform models feminist and community-centered approaches to AI governance, enhanced by the Data Feminism Bias Reporting Tool to detect omissions and distortions. The project culminates in a UCSB workshop and a special issue of Kalfou presenting policy briefs, toolkits, and white papers on participatory AI development.
Laila Shereen Sakr is a scholar and artist whose work bridges artificial intelligence, media industries, and digital art. Known for pioneering feminist and decolonial approaches to AI, she directs the R-Shief platform—an innovative social network for data storytelling, visualization, and citational analysis. Through her artistic persona VJ Um Amel, Sakr explores algorithmic culture, glitch aesthetics, and the politics of data in immersive installations and publications such as Arabic Glitch (Stanford University Press, 2023) and Capital Glitch (2021). Her interdisciplinary practice reimagines how AI can serve cultural memory, ethical computation, and creative resistance across global media systems.
Cathy Thomas is a writer, filmmaker, and creative critical scholar whose work on the ‘Black Fantastic’ and decolonial feminist thought & praxis is enriched by discovering modes of play and resistance in literature, comic books, natural language processing, tv-film-stage, through cosplay, while wining up at Caribbean Carnival. She is Assistant Professor of English at UCSB and Director of the UCSB Creative Critical Writing Initiative.
This project investigates how artificial intelligence is reshaping creative labor in the video game industry, particularly for voice actors navigating issues of precarity, consent, and authorship. Combining ethnographic interviews, fieldwork at trade and technology shows, discourse analysis, and policy review, the study examines how AI voice synthesis redefines value, embodiment, and ownership within performance. Grounded in feminist and labor studies, it explores how unions and advocacy groups respond to automation and inequity in a largely non-unionized field of video games. Through critical-prototyping, the project reveals the power dynamics and affective dimensions of voice labor in AI-driven media production.
Rosita Scerbo is Associate Professor of Visual and Digital Cultures at Georgia State University, where she is a leading member of the Integrated Computing Program in the College of Arts and Sciences. As part of this work, she is launching a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary pathway that bridges Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) with Data Science. Her current research and teaching examine the intersections of artificial intelligence, social difference, gender, and algorithmic equity, with particular attention to visual culture and the politics of machine perception. She teaches WGSS 3115: Gender and Race in AI and Gaming annually, integrating feminist and decolonial frameworks to interrogate algorithmic bias, digital rights, and the ethics of emerging technologies.
Kate Fortmueller is Associate Professor of Film and Media History in the School of Film, Media & Theatre and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. Her work focuses on labor and crises in the U.S. media industries. She is the author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production (2021), Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of Covid (2021), co-author of Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers (2026), and co-editor of Hollywood Unions (2025).
Korea has recently transformed its cultural production by adopting AI technologies in the creation of various cultural forms, such as dramas, reality shows, films, digital games, and webtoons. Many creators and cultural industry companies have begun using various AI technologies to develop cultural programs. This project provides critical insights into local screen industries that utilize AI technologies. It explores the crucial collaboration between popular culture and AI in cultural production, discussing how cultural creators develop AI-supported cultural programs both systematically and textually. It also discusses the critical understanding of AI-embedded popular culture in terms of creativity and audience reception.
Dal Yong Jin is a Distinguished Professor at Simon Fraser University. Jin’s major research and teaching interests are digital platforms, artificial intelligence, digital games, globalization, transnational cultural studies, and the political economy of media. Jin has published numerous books, including New Korean Wave: Transnational Cultural Power in the Age of Social Media (2016), Artificial Intelligence in Cultural Production: Critical Perspectives on Digital Platforms (2021), and Understanding Korean Webtoon Culture: Transmedia Storytelling, Digital Platforms, and Genres (2022). In May 2022, Jin was inducted as a fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA). He is the founding book series editor of Routledge Research in Digital Media and Culture in Asia.
About the Media Industries - AI Research Initiative
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 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 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.
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?
The Carsey-Wolf Center has led major media industry research initiatives including the Connected Viewing Initiative and the Creative Labor Initiative. These projects have resulted 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).
