Panelists: Christine Tran, John Wihbey, Seo Eun “Sunny” Yang

Description: Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the creator economy and influencer culture at lightning speed. From hyper-real virtual influencers to AI-generated video content that’s populating TikTok and Instagram, AI influencers erase the distinction between human imagination, machine automation, and promotion.

This webinar explores how synthetic content creators are redefining authenticity, labor, and identity online. With critical and creative lenses, we’ll explore how these trends unveil deeper questions regarding gender, race, and power in the generative media era—who gets represented, who gets erased, and how algorithmic aesthetics are globalizing new forms of digital labor and desire.

This event is part of the Center for Transformative Media’s AI Webinar Series.

Speaker Bios:

Christine H. Tran is a poet, performer, and an Assistant Professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at AUArts. As a public commentator of Internet cultures, Dr. Tran reckons with the entanglements between social media and controversial play. Their work places a special emphasis on livestreaming, platform logics, influencer industries, and feminist tactics for survival in professional gaming. This work has been published in journals such as Television & New Media, JCMS, New Media & Society, and other venues. Dr. Tran is also a proud cofounder of the Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN). You can read (or watch) Dr. Tran’s media commentaries in features from Rolling Stone, The Guardian, WIRED, BBC Future, CBC, Business Insider, Slate, The Globe and Mail, and other new outlets. Their work is also frequently translated into poetic and journalistic formats, with news features in The Conversation, Midnight Sun, and The Puritan, in addition to scholarly performance workshops on/about Zoom.

John P. Wihbey is Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) at Northeastern University and an associate professor of media innovation in the College of Arts, Media and Design. He is a faculty researcher at the Ethics Institute and a co-founder of Northeastern’s Internet Democracy Initiative, which is launching the Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy (IIID). He is an affiliate associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences.

Seo Eun Yang (the phonetic spelling: Saw-Uhn Yang, Nickname: Sunny) is a political scientist who studies graph/network theory, deep learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Computer Vision (CV). She is jointly appointed at the Department of Political Science and at the College of Arts, Media and Design. Her research interest lies at the intersection of communication, psychology, and computational social science, with an emphasis on photojournalism, visual politics, framing studies, and political neuroscience.