Projects (Dr Chow Pei-Sze)

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) technologies inspire both hype and horror at the perceived ability to emulate or even surpass human expression and creativity. In the media industries, the emergence of GAI tools has sparked similar mixed reactions, with screenwriters, actors, visual effects artists, video editors, and composers not only enthusiastic, but also uncertain about the long-term impacts on their (already precarious) work as creative professionals. This uncertainty faced by creative practitioners is magnified in the absence of sector-specific regulations and guidelines around responsible and equitable uses of GAI. 

This project examines the fears and hopes faced by creative professionals in Singapore and beyond, with a focus on how the labour of workers in the audiovisual media professions are affected by GAI creative tools. While some practitioners have embraced the call to ‘reskill’ themselves, many may face the realities of ‘deskilling’. This project adopts a critical lens to the examination of how the introduction of GAI into cultural production is restructuring creative labour and seeks to study how cultural policy can advance worker-centric and equitable uses of GAI. 

Relevant publications: 

This project examines how AI has been represented in popular science fiction film and television drama from Asia and seeks to analyse how the audiovisual texts both reflect and challenge dominant sociotechnical imaginaries of the utility and role of AI in society, while also working to map how national AI policies and strategies are mediated by popular culture. Given that current popular imaginings emerging from the West have shaped and dominated public imaginations about AI deployment globally, further research is needed to pluralise global imaginaries of AI, and specifically focus on how Singaporean and other Asian perspectives might contribute more holistic perspectives of AI deployment in global societies. 

Drawing from close textual analyses of contemporary Asian science fiction film and TV drama from 2010 onwards, as well as discourse analysis of state AI policies of various Asian states (including Singapore, South Korea, China, Japan), this project will argue that Asian science fiction media narratives present different socio-technical imaginaries than that of dominant (Hollywood-driven) visions, where the relationship between AI and human societies in Asian cultures is one of cautious optimism and co-existence. 

The novelty of this project lies in its decidedly non-Anglo-American and comparative inter-Asian emphasis, specifically as it seeks to foreground Asian texts and perspectives in order to pluralise current global imaginaries of AI. This present work is thus also a project of decolonising science fiction cinema scholarship, which has thus far only focused on Asia not as a site of praxis and theory, but as an object othered as ‘alien’.