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Paper Short Abstract:

Ethnographers must adapt theory and methods to account for the growing presence of AI actors in online interactions and content creation. This paper emphasizes the need to move beyond simply identifying "real" humans online and instead focus on understanding how AI and humans co-create digital culture. The paper aims to explore the implications of this shift for ethnographic research and writing.

Paper Abstract:

As global culture digitized over the course of the past decades, anthropologists too went online, following the now five billion internet users as they enact, negotiate, consume and create online. Such processes shifted the way ethnographers conducted their research away from embodied experience and interpersonal ties toward narrativization and more depersonalized data gathering. Ethnographers encountered bad actors, state-aligned manipulators, bots, trolls and every other sort of digital mask that made traditional ethnographers' problems (e.g., less-than-honest informants) seem almost trite. The ability of generative AI to produce believable text and images from simple prompts further complicates ethnographers' efforts to address subjectivity in online ethnography. However, ethnographic methods have proven resilient and reflexive, able to incorporate the agency of non-human actors (e.g., corporations, deities, non-human animals). I argue that AI necessitates a similar approach. Rather than seeking to delineate whether the subjects we encounter online are human or not, ethnographers must contend with and adapt to a digital world that is co-created with AI and algorithms. This is true even to the individual content level, as content is now more often created from an AI aligned to corporate beliefs and goals, prompted by real people with a purpose in mind and later modified to better fit that goal. This paper examines the politics and poetics of AI actors, offering insights for navigating a digital field increasingly populated by sophisticated non-human participants.