Imagining audiences in the age of generative AI

This Cultural Commons article examines how generative AI reconfigures practices of imagining audiences in media and cultural production. Moving beyond dominant debates on labour, creativity, and audience preference, it draws on the concept of imagined audiences to recentre questions of culture, meaning, and power. From a production studies perspective, the article identifies three key problematics intensified by AI: the shifting visibility of audiences amid content abundance and algorithmic mediation; the enduring yet amplified unknowability of audience response; and the transformation of audience knowledge through AI-generated ‘synthetic audiences’. It argues that generative AI produces palimpsestic audience imaginaries – layered, partially erased, and recombined traces of multiple cultural contexts – that complicate practitioners’ ability to stabilise value, authenticity, and taste. At the same time, it highlights how producers actively negotiate these uncertainties through situated articulatory practices, where social, algorithmic, and generative logics intersect. By conceptualising audience imaginaries as co-produced with the technosphere, the article offers a framework for analysing how cultural meaning and power are reconstituted in AI-mediated media environments, while also identifying these sites of negotiation as potential spaces for resistance and rearticulation.