The stage recurs with such consistency that Gitelman treats it as a structural feature of media transitions. The technology is used to perform tasks that existing media already perform, and the evaluation criteria are borrowed from the displaced medium. The borrowed criteria are coherent — they describe what the new medium does well relative to the old one — and also profoundly inadequate, because what the new medium can become is not deducible from what it currently is.
AI-assisted cultural production is at the moving-pictures stage. You On AI itself is in most respects a moving-pictures artifact — a book that uses AI to produce a faster, smoother version of what books have always been. The structure is conventional. The argument is sequential. The voice belongs to a named individual. But the text contains moments — the laparoscopic surgery connection, the cross-chapter links — that point beyond the moving-pictures stage toward capabilities specific to the new medium.
The exit from the stage is slow. It requires not just technical refinement but the wholesale development of new protocols — new production practices, new distribution channels, new evaluative frameworks, new categories for crediting participants and assessing value. The exit is never directed by any single participant; it proceeds through the accumulated decisions of practitioners, institutions, and audiences operating without established norms.
The political significance of the stage lies in the gap between what the technology can technically do and what the existing protocols allow it to be understood to do. The gap is the space in which fluent fabrication thrives — where AI-generated outputs inherit the epistemic guarantees of print-culture formats without the processes those formats conventionally imply.
The concept derives from Gitelman's historical work on early cinema, early phonograph culture, and early Internet development — three cases where the structural pattern is clearly documented in the archival record.
Faster or cheaper. The new medium is first deployed to produce faster, cheaper, more convenient versions of what existing media already produce.
Borrowed evaluation. The criteria for assessing the new medium's products are borrowed from the displaced medium, producing a coherent but profoundly inadequate framework.
Invisible capabilities. The medium's distinctive operations are invisible during this phase because they are being perceived through categories that cannot accommodate them.
Exit through practice. The stage ends through practical experimentation, not through theory — through formal innovations that accumulate into conventions specific to the new medium.
Diagnostic moments. Flashes of the new medium's distinctive operations occur within the borrowed framework; these moments are the seeds from which new protocols grow.