CONCEPT
Who Holds the Measuring Tape
The volume's governing question: the conventions settling around AI-assisted production are being cut by specific institutional hands — and the fit of the resulting garment will reflect whose measurements were used.
Convention-forming is a power struggle. This observation is unremarkable among historians of media but conspicuously absent from most popular accounts of technological change, which present the development of new conventions as organic and driven by the technology's inherent properties. The naturalization of conventions is itself a form of power. Gitelman's framework insists that the conventions forming around AI-assisted cultural production — how credit is attributed, how quality is evaluated, how economic value is distributed — are being shaped by identifiable institutional actors with specific interests whose power is unequal. Technology companies control the medium's capabilities and terms of service. Publishers control access to audiences. Academic institutions set evaluation standards. Individual practitioners have the least institutional power, even though their accumulated decisions constitute the raw material from which conventions form. The measuring tape is in someone's hands. The question is whose.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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