Audiovisual Creation in the Age of AI
Special Issue for 2027
In 2023, an AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti horrified and charmed the internet thanks to its unconvincing and uncanny appearance. Compared to text generation, AI’s audiovisual creation capacity seemed to lag. Owing to its popularity, the video quickly became a yardstick to track the development of these technologies. As time passed, newer iterations of Will Smith eating spaghetti demonstrated the impressive – and to some alarming – rhythm with which Generative AI (genAI) improved their audiovisual capabilities. At the same time, using Smith in videos raises ethical questions related to practices such as deepfakes of celebrities and the broader public, which extend to concerns in social media and beyond about disinformation, intellectual property, dependency, privacy risks, and so on.
Scholarly work has addressed the uses and impact of genAI, and more work is needed on the intersection between academia and audiovisual production. Indeed, the vast variety of image, sound, and video AI generators from companies such as Google, Adobe, OpenAI, and Midjourney has transformed the landscape of audiovisual creation. In higher education, this software allows instructors, students, and staff members to create posters, podcast episodes, infographics, storyboards, and much more in seconds. GenAI thereby provides more than raw materials; they are now capable of producing finished projects. These possibilities motivate questions about the creative processes in class and reflections upon originality and authorship.
Since 2023, JWAI has hosted three conferences, each focusing on a different topic: Writing, Teaching, and Research in the Age of AI, respectively. For this special issue, we would like participants to think beyond the written page to explore the role of AI across media in the classroom and related contexts. While this special issue is separate from the upcoming 2027 conference, we would invite potential contributors to consider participating in the TBA conference on Creativity in the Age of AI.
JWAI invites proposals that address AI and audiovisual creation thoughtfully, dynamically, and compellingly. We welcome works that explore the role of AI across media in the classroom and related contexts beyond the written page. We are interested in topics including, but not limited to, the following:
Pedagogy:
Generating audiovisual media for class
Audiovisual collaboration with AI
Scaffolding: sketches, storyboards, mockups
Skills: video editing, recording, image rendering
Effective prompts
Assessment and grading strategies with/for AI-generated projects
Ability, disability, and accessibility in the classroom and calibrating assignments
Philosophy:
Originality and creativity with/despite AI
Deepfakes, safety, credibility, recognition, and trust
Media literacy crises
Reflections on the uncanny, contradictory, and unsettling
Writing as multimedia process
Aesthetic homogenization (the recognizable “AI look”)
Policy:
Guidelines for syllabi and curricula
Copyright, ownership, liability
Environmental and sustainability impacts of computing heavy audiovisual models
Labor and displacement
Consent, privacy, materials, and data governance
Play:
Humor, parody, and satire
Trends and memes
Fan culture remixes
Gaming and streaming
The interactive, multimodal, immersive, and animated
The content types for submissions include articles (up to 10,000 words), approaches (max. 5,000 words), applications (max. 3,000 words), and angles (max. 1,500 words), which JWAI has published in the past. We are, however, interested in other forms.
Submissions
Please submit abstracts and keywords at www.jwai.org/avc. Deadline: 20 December 2026. We will send notifications in January, 2027. We hope to have all submissions by July, 2027.
Contact
Felipe González-Silva, PhD
Post-Doctoral Associate
CLAS | University Writing Program
University of Florida
fgonzalezsilva