ABSTRACT
Drawing upon a case study from Botswana, this chapter analyses the challenges of creative authorship and ownership of film in an era of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. With Gibson's affordances and Hutchby's sociotechnical adaption as the theoretical framework, this paper examines how AI changes material configurations and cultural practices in film production. Interviews with Botswana filmmakers suggest there are contradictory, dual responses, to the extent that AI is considered a vehicle through which new efficacious aesthetic forms can be arrived at, while also reproducing the hegemonic Western aesthetic norms raising flagrantly fears of erasure of culture. Such issues speak to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's attack on cultural imperialism and come back to the operation between innovation and the autonomy of knowledges. To theorize this, the chapter draws on Amabile's model of creative motivation, Bourdieu's cultural production, and Foucault's author-function, while connecting with recent postcolonial critiques of data colonialism and platform capitalism. The analysis identifies existing copyright regimes, in particular discourses promulgated by the U.S. Copyright Office, that reinforce a human-centred focus on authorship, which are becoming outmoded in relation to AI-mediated production. A future research agenda is proposed in the end, to consider future the socio-legal, cultural, and political implications of AI-enabled filmmaking in the Global South.
