Book Title: Critiquing AI in Media
Edited by J.J. Sylvia IV
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Book Description: Critiquing AI in Media (Fitchburg State Open Books, 2025), edited by J.J. Sylvia IV, is a peer-reviewed open-access anthology of original media criticism produced by students in Media Criticism (COMM 4240) during Spring 2025. Each chapter applies established critical methods — drawing on theorists such as Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Laura Mulvey, and Donna Haraway — to analyze how film, television, and video games reflect, reinforce, or resist cultural anxieties about artificial intelligence. Students engaged in a full academic publishing cycle including formal proposals, anonymous peer review, and revision, producing essays on works ranging from Detroit: Become Human and Terminator 2 to M3GAN, Stray, and Iron Man. Available digitally at no cost, the collection models rigorous, open, and publicly accessible scholarship.
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Book Information
Book Description
Critiquing AI in Media is an open-access anthology of original media criticism produced by students enrolled in Media Criticism (COMM 4240) at Fitchburg State University during the Spring 2025 semester, edited by J.J. Sylvia IV. Each chapter applies one or more established critical methods to a work of film, television, or video games through the lens of artificial intelligence, asking how popular media reflects, reinforces, or resists cultural anxieties about AI and its broader social implications.
Rather than producing traditional papers read only by an instructor, students engaged in a rigorous, full-cycle academic publishing process — developing formal proposals, compiling annotated bibliographies, drafting manuscripts, submitting to anonymous peer review, and revising based on feedback from both classmates and their professor. The result is a collection of voices that are at once student and scholar.
The chapters range widely across media and method. Essays examine the AI-rights narrative of Detroit: Become Human through Critical Discourse Analysis, drawing on Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, and Norman Fairclough; the ethics of AI afterlife technology in the documentary Eternal You; gendered AI representation in Subservience through the feminist frameworks of Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway; the cultural myth of machine apocalypse in Terminator 2; and the use of AI-generated assets in Call of Duty microtransactions analyzed through political economy. Additional chapters take on M3GAN, I Am Mother, Upgrade, Stray, Iron Man, and the BBC documentary How to Build a Human, interrogating themes of Western universalism, capitalism, genre, and the acousmêtre.
Available digitally at no cost, Critiquing AI in Media demonstrates that students can produce scholarship worthy of public readership while modeling what rigorous, open, and accessible academic work looks like in practice.
License
Critiquing AI in Media Copyright © 2026 by J.J. Sylvia IV is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Subject
Cultural and media studies
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Critiquing AI in Media Copyright © 2026 by J.J. Sylvia IV is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.