CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 24Media and Digital CommunicationArt, Technology, and CultureLiterature, Culture, and Aesthetics

Fandom meets artificial intelligence: Rethinking participatory culture as human–community–machine interactions

Open access
Li, Eva Cheuk-Yin, Pang, Ka-Wei·2024·European Journal of Cultural Studies
DOI 10.1177/13675494241236146
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Fandom as an interpretive community is the frontier for rich insights into the multi-layered interactions and practices between individual users, communities and intelligent machines. To understand the challenges and opportunities Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents to contemporary media and culture, we discuss how fans engage with AI, as fandom provides meaningful insights into interactions between individual technology users, the collective and machines. We propose rethinking participatory culture as human–community–machine interactions to understand the wider implications of AI to society and culture. We outline three emerging phenomena and potential consequences of fans’ engagement with AI: (1) fan labour made (un)easy, (2) parasocial interactions (un)familiarised and (3) realities (un)settled. Our conceptualisation transcends existing computer science research, which assumes technology users as isolated individuals and also fan studies, which largely focus on text-audience relationships and tend to take digital technologies for granted as the preconditions of fans’ creative and playful practices.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1177/13675494241236146

Cites

1 of 1 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Users often experience synthetic companions as emotionally real, even when cognitively aware of their artificiality.

    “users often experience synthetic companions as emotionally real, even when cognitively aware of their artificiality”

    From Toward an Ethic of Synthetic Relationality: Identity, Intimacy, and Risk in AI-Mediated Roleplay Environments (2025) · cites this paper as Li and Pang 2024

    In “Parasocial interactions (un)familiarised” (p. 5), the paper describes Kizuna Ai fans accepting her nonhumanness and receiving emotional support, despite knowing she was human-operated. That supports a narrower point about fans’ emotional engagement with a virtual performer, not a general claim that users often experience AI companions as emotionally real. The same section reports that some fans found AI-generated calls inauthentic. (LLM, conf=0.85)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 26

  1. Alzaabi S and Rabab'ah G (2023) Conceptual metaphors in YouTube auto-generated subtitles: BBC travel show as a case. International Journal of Humanities Education 22: 57-75.
  2. Booth P (2015) Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age . Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press.
  3. Chin B and Morimoto LH (2013) Towards a theory of transcultural fandom. Participations: Journal of Audience Research 10(1): 92-108.
  4. Connor T (2016) Hatsune Miku, 2.0Pac, and beyond: Rewinding the fast-forwarding the virtual pop star. In: Whiteley S and Rambarran S (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality . New York: Oxford University Press, pp.129-134.
  5. Guo T and Evans J (2020) Translational and transnational queer fandom in China: The fansubbing of Carol. Feminist Media Studies 20(4): 515-529.
  6. Guzman AL and Lewis SC (2020) Artificial intelligence and communication: A human-machine communication research agenda. New Media & Society 22(1): 70-86.
  7. Guzman AL, McEwen R and Jones S (2023) The SAGE Handbook of Human-Machine Communication . London: Sage.
  8. Harriss C (2017) The producer as fan: Forensic fandom and the good wife. Journal of Communication Inquiry 41(4): 368-381.
  9. Hills M (2015) From parasocial to multisocial interaction: Theorising material/digital fandom and celebrity. In: Marshall PD and Redmon S (eds) A Companion to Celebrity . Malden MA: John Wiley & Sons, pp.463-482.
  10. Jenkins H (2006a) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide . New York: NYU Press.
  11. Jenkins H (2006b) Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture . New York: NYU Press.
  12. Jenkins H, Ito M and boyd d (2016) Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics . Malden, MA: Polity Press.
  13. Kang EJ, Kim H, Kim H, et al. (2022) When AI meets the K-Pop culture: A case study of fans' perception of AI private call. In: 36th conference on neural information processing systems. NeurIPS 2022 . Available at: https://ai-cultures.github.io/papers/when\_ai\_meets\_the\_k\_pop\_ cultur.pdf (accessed 2 January 2024).
  14. Karnouskos S (2020) Artificial Intelligence in digital media: The era of deepfakes. IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society 1(3): 138-147.
  15. Lynch KS (2020) Fans as transcultural gatekeepers: The hierarchy of BTS' Anglophone Reddit fandom and the digital East-West media flow. New Media & Society 24(1): 105-121.
  16. Mussies M (2023) Artificial intelligence and the production of fan art. Transformative Works and Cultures 40. DOI: 10.3983/twc.2023.2431 · DOI
  17. Pang KW (2023) Queer motherly fantasy: The Sinophone mom fandom of Saint Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana. In: Zhao JJ (ed.) Queer TV China: Televisual and Fannish Imaginaries of Gender, Sexuality, and Chineseness . Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp.178-199.
  18. Ponder ML, Leak T and Meggs KE (2023) Deepfakes as misinformation: The next frontier of sports fandom. In: Langmia K (ed.) Black Communication in the Age of Disinformation: DeepFakes and Synthetic Media . Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp.73-87.
  19. Popova M (2020) Reading out of context: Pornographic deepfakes, celebrity and intimacy. Porn Studies 7(4): 367-381.
  20. Soe TH, Guribye F and Slavkovik M (2021) Evaluating AI assisted subtitling. In: ACM international conference on interactive media experiences , Virtual Event USA, 21 June, pp.96-107. ACM. Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3452918.3458792 (accessed 18 October 2023). · DOI
  21. Turk T (2014) Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom's gift economy. Transformative Works and Cultures 15. DOI: 10.3983/twc.2014.0518. · DOI
  22. Westerlund M (2019) The emergence of deepfake technology: A review. Technology Innovation Management Review 9(11): 39-52.
  23. Yin Y (2020) An emergent algorithmic culture: The data-ization of online fandom in China. International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(4): 475-492.
  24. Zaborowski R (2016) Hatsune Miku and Japanese virtual idols. In: Whiteley S and Rambarran S (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality . New York: Oxford University Press, pp.111-128.
  25. Zhang Q and Negus K (2020) East Asian pop music idol production and the emergence of data fandom in China. International Journal of Cultural Studies 23(4): 493-511.
  26. Zhou X (2021) Virtual YouTuber Kizuna AI: Co-creating human-non-human interaction and celebrity-audience relationships. In: Doona J (ed.) Excellent Msc Dissertations 2020 (1st edn). Lund: Lund University, pp.205-253. Available at: https://www.css.lu.se/fileadmin/user\_ upload/kom/Filer/PDF/MKV/Master/web\_MSc\_excellent\_thesises\_\_2020.pdf#page=207

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Li, E. C.-Y., & Pang, K.-W.
Affiliations
  • Lancaster University (GB)
  • Chinese University of Hong Kong (HK)
Corresponding author
Li, Eva Cheuk-Yin
ORCID
Venue
European Journal of Cultural Studies
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2024-03-10
Volume
27
Issue
4
Pages
778-787
ISSN
  • 1367-5494 (ISSN-L)
  • 1460-3551
DOI
10.1177/13675494241236146
OpenAlex
W4392653366
Cited by
24
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 12 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 2
FWCI
3.54
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • European Journal of Cultural Studies (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • Research Portal (King's College London) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • Lancaster EPrints (Lancaster University) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Art, Technology, and Culture
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Museology › Literature, Culture, and Aesthetics
Keywords
fandom, artificial intelligence, participatory culture, parasocial interaction, fan studies, intelligent machines, media and culture

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review