KIME seminar: From algomaxxing to AI influencers

Seminaret vil inneholde foredrag fra to gjesteforskere som arbeider med forskning på nyskapende fenomener i digital kultur – algomaxxing og AI-influensere – etterfulgt av en lunsjdiskusjon der deltakerne kan gi og motta tilbakemeldinger på sin egen utvikling av begreper og metoder for studiet av lignende temaer.

Lunsjen er gratis for alle som melder seg på seminaret. Vennligst godta denne kalenderinvitasjonen, eller kontakt en av arrangørene for å bli inkludert i lunsjbestillingen.

PROGRAM:

09:30: Velkomst og introduksjon fra KIME

09:45: Foredrag av Idil Galip (ekstern lenke): Algomaxxing: Notes on cultural production after the algorithm

10:45: Kaffepause

11:00: Foredrag av Alexandra Deem (ekstern lenke): Automating authenticity: The rise of AI influencers 

12:00: Lunsj og diskusjon med foredragsholderne: «Utvikling av begreper og metoder for studiet av AI-kulturer»

Idil Galip - Algomaxxing: Notes on cultural production after the algorithm

Increasingly, cultural producers — across new media, music, film, art, literature, and fashion — forge anticipatory and recursive (Beer 2022) relations with social media algorithms. “Influencer creep” (Bishop 2025) has made its way into most kinds of creative work, where optimising algorithmic discoverability is now also part of the job. In digital folklore, “The Algorithm” appears as a sentient entity (Lupinacci 2024), a kind of techno-cultural gatekeeping deity (Galip 2023) that, with the right inputs, can be prompted, appeased (Glatt 2022), or managed (Bishop 2019). Everyday cultural production thus becomes oriented toward algorithmic optimisation — algomaxxing — an algorithmically mediated set of value relations that manifests as both a cynical disposition and a distinctive aesthetic register of (too) late capitalism (Kornbluh 2024). From clipfarming and memecoins to AI slop and ragebait, algomaxxing saturates everyday digital culture. In this talk, I turn to three research cases from the Anglophone web to show how.

İdil Galip is a writer and researcher whose work investigates the meme as the foundational infrastructure of contemporary culture and politics. She examines how memetic media form new publics, dictate the rhythms of attention, and act as an ideological battleground. Her writing, spanning academic journals, arts publications, and experimental zines, operates within and against traditional knowledge economies. She founded the Meme Studies Research Network in 2020 and currently lectures at the University of Amsterdam. She has a PhD in sociology from the University of Edinburgh.

Alexandra Deem - Automating authenticity: The rise of AI influencers 

The proliferation of AI influencers on social media unsettles one of the core organizing logics of the Web 2.0 era: authenticity. Since the early 2000s, authenticity has been a key currency of the creator economy whereby the affective labor, self-expression, and visibility of content creators and influencers is leveraged in service of brand campaigns and digital marketing. Encompassing AI-generated doubles of human creators, entirely fictional avatars, and various shades of gray in between, AI influencers both deepen and refigure the extractive function of authenticity discourse on social media platforms, which have increasingly been oriented less around sociality and more around the consumption of content at scale. The MSCA project AI INFLUENCE investigates the implications of these shifts through ethnographic research among those creating and deploying AI influencers, primarily on Instagram and TikTok. This presentation shares findings from the ongoing research and positions AI influencers as outcomes of “post-authentic storytelling,” forms of hybrid human-AI narrative production in which the perception of authenticity is still paramount but is tied less to facticity or autobiographical referentiality than affective plausibility, vibe, and resonance. It emphasizes the gendered implications of such storytelling, from the performance of feminized labor and entrenchment of dominant beauty norms to distinctly gendered monetization strategies. 

Alexandra Deem is a Marie-Sklodowska Curie postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She works between the fields of digital anthropology and feminist cultural studies. Her current project investigates the impact of generative AI on the creator economy through ethnographic research among those creating and deploying AI influencers on social media. She recently published a book with Routledge titled The Tradwife Revolution: An Ethnography of Trad Futurism on Social Media. 

Lunsj og diskusjon med foredragsholderne (12:00 - 14:00): «Utvikling av begreper og metoder for studiet av AI-kulturer»

Etter de to foredragene inviteres påmeldte deltakere til å bli igjen til lunsj og bes om å ta med ett enkelt begrep eller én metode de er interessert i å utforske i studiet av KI, algoritmer eller digital kultur. Dette vil vi diskutere i en runde med korte samtaler sammen med de to foredragsholderne og de øvrige deltakerne.

Seminaret arrangeres av ALGOFOLK-prosjektet (Algorithmic folklore: The mutual shaping of vernacular creativity and automation) ved Senter for digitale fortellinger, og Imagine-prosjektet (Citizen perceptions of AI in everyday media life) ved Institutt for informasjons- og medievitenskap. Samarbeidet er finansiert av et tilskudd fra UiBs strategi for humaniora, med temaet autentisitet og digitale medier i en KI-æra (KIME – Kunstig intelligens og autentisk medieinnhold).