Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how AI is used and imagined by creative-intellectual workers in the Canadian Visual Effects industry, focusing on how it extends or changes earlier forms of human-computer interaction in VFX, and how industry rhetoric mediates VFX workers' experiences of these processes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore how artificial intelligence is used and imagined by creative-intellectual workers in the Canadian Visual Effects industry. Canadian VFX can be situated within the post-Fordist “knowledge economy” (Powell and Snellman 2004). Contemporary VFX is characterized by outsourced, globalized supply chain labour wherein workers from different companies collaborate on sequences through a geographically-dispersed digital pipeline. In this context, Canadian governmental and educational strategies have worked to position the cities Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver as "centers of transnational production" (Curtin and Sanson 2017), and their workers’ skills as national resource.

Although AI has been part of VFX software for some time, industry discourse has begun to more extensively report and problematize its rapid integration into creative processes. While some fear an intelligence supplanting workers who trade specifically on their knowledge, in a field already marked by precarity, others are optimistic, focusing on how AI will allow workers to focus on “creative”, rather than "laborious" tasks. I will account for how AI is being integrated into VFX practice in ways that may extend or alter earlier applications, combining theories of embodied knowledge and skilled craft from performance and anthropology with software studies accounts of the interface as process (Galloway 2012) and the "unknowability" of algorithms (Bucher 2016) to complexify understandings of human-computer interaction in this creative industry. Secondly, I will address how workers’ experience of AI is framed by industry rhetoric, drawing on production culture studies theories of how industry discourse reflexively narrativizes and mediates knowledge about itself (Caldwell 2008).