Connective AI Social (Ro)Bots, Play, Democracy

1. Introduction
Zizi Papacharissi

2. What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate: Visually Generative AI and the Civic Imagination
Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Alfonos Hegde, and members of the Civic Paths Research Group

3. Gaming the System
David J. Gunkel

4. AI Has Joined the Chat: Exploring the Role of Generative AI Assistants in Group Chats
Eden Litt, Nicole B. Ellison, Lauren Scissors, Isabelle Giordano, and Shreshta Bhat

5. The Silent Chatbot: On the Democratic Significance of Silence in AI-Mediated Communication
Taina Bucher

6. Beyond Representation and Bias: Mimicry and Distillation Through generative a.i.
William R. Frey and Kishonna L. Gray

7. Digital Inequality in ChatGPT Awareness and Knowledge
Eszter Hargittai, Gerta Lokaj, and Lukas Hess

8. Mainstreaming AI: How Journalists Play with Emerging Technologies
Maxwell Foxman and David B. Nieborg

9. Designing the AI Maze: How the Tech Industry Entraps Users
Peter Nagy

10. The Feminist Artificial Intelligence Playbook
Sophie Toupin

11. Privacy at Play: Anticipating Hyper-personalization in Conversational Robot Toys 

Samantha Shorey and Katie Joseff

12. Do Asians Respect AI More? Towards the “Social Exchange Agents Principle” and “Human-Machine Harmony” for Communicative AI Ethics
Jindong Leo-Liu

13. Playing with AI in Video Games: Lessons About the Human Main Character Syndrome from Non-Player Characters
Do Own (Donna) Kim

14. {Not} All Fun and Games in Virtual Reality: The State of Prosocial and Antisocial VR Play
Tony Liao

15. Talking to Non-Stochastic Parrots: Human-Machine Communication and Human-Animal Communication in Parallel Lines
Simone Natale

16. The Model Museum: AI at the Museum-Museum Interface
Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K. Sunde

17. Gen AI in Support of Democratic Debates? The Case of Environmental Activism
Giovanna Mascheroni, Simone Tosoni, and Fausto Colombo

18. Voice of the Ogiek: Play, Co-Design, and the Spiral Return of Orality in Connective AI
Autumn Edwards, L. Lusike Mukhongo, Winston Mano, Chad Edwards, Cynthia Klekar Cunningham, and Alexander Kisioi Koech

Biography

Zizi Papacharissi is UIC Distinguished Professor of Communication and Political Science at the University of Illinois Chicago and Department Head of Communication. She is also a university scholar and affiliate faculty with the Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois System. Her work focuses on the social and political consequences of online media. She has published ten books and over 80 journal articles and book chapters and serves on the editorial boards of 15 journals. She is the founding and current editor of the open access journal Social Media & Society. Her work has been translated into Greek, German, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Turkish, and Persian.

"Can artificial intelligence serve democracy or only disrupt it? Moving beyond Silicon Valley's standard narratives, this volume proposes connective AI:  technology designed with democratic values at its core rather than as afterthought. This stellar group of scholars explore alternative approaches to human-machine relations grounded in imagination, play, and collective renewal."

- Kate Crawford, Professor at the University of Southern California, author of Atlas of AI

"Dare we hope for a future where advances in digital technology radically strengthen rather than replace our social fabric and are guided rather than cynically disdained by social theory?  After reading this consistently delightful, insightful and provocative collection, I do!"

- E. Glen Weyl, Founder and Chair, RadicalxChange Foundation and/or Founder and Research Lead, Microsoft Research Plural Technology Collaboratory