{"title":"Artificial imaginaries: Generative AIs as an advanced form of capitalism","authors":"Elise Berlinski , Jérémy Morales , Samuel Sponem","doi":"10.1016/j.cpa.2024.102723","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In this essay, we characterize three paradoxical imaginaries that structure the development of generative artificial intelligence (genAI). At the institutional level, these technologies develop in a context that celebrates openness and liberality. Yet, both in the US and in Europe, they serve to centralize power and resources. At the organizational level, while the imaginary is that these technologies make work more interesting, we show that they rather produce anxiety and a new class of precarious workers. At the epistemic level, generative artificial intelligence promises access to unlimited knowledge. This knowledge may appear robust, as these technologies become performative. However, the knowledge they produce is doubtful. Overall, these technologies centralize power and exclude, they standardize knowledge, and they produce, reproduce, amplify and extend various structures of domination.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48078,"journal":{"name":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":8.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235424000224/pdfft?md5=24721696795c62418fa4f4fb87b6cb24&pid=1-s2.0-S1045235424000224-main.pdf","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Critical Perspectives on Accounting","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235424000224","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In this essay, we characterize three paradoxical imaginaries that structure the development of generative artificial intelligence (genAI). At the institutional level, these technologies develop in a context that celebrates openness and liberality. Yet, both in the US and in Europe, they serve to centralize power and resources. At the organizational level, while the imaginary is that these technologies make work more interesting, we show that they rather produce anxiety and a new class of precarious workers. At the epistemic level, generative artificial intelligence promises access to unlimited knowledge. This knowledge may appear robust, as these technologies become performative. However, the knowledge they produce is doubtful. Overall, these technologies centralize power and exclude, they standardize knowledge, and they produce, reproduce, amplify and extend various structures of domination.
期刊介绍:
Critical Perspectives on Accounting aims to provide a forum for the growing number of accounting researchers and practitioners who realize that conventional theory and practice is ill-suited to the challenges of the modern environment, and that accounting practices and corporate behavior are inextricably connected with many allocative, distributive, social, and ecological problems of our era. From such concerns, a new literature is emerging that seeks to reformulate corporate, social, and political activity, and the theoretical and practical means by which we apprehend and affect that activity. Research Areas Include: • Studies involving the political economy of accounting, critical accounting, radical accounting, and accounting''s implication in the exercise of power • Financial accounting''s role in the processes of international capital formation, including its impact on stock market stability and international banking activities • Management accounting''s role in organizing the labor process • The relationship between accounting and the state in various social formations • Studies of accounting''s historical role, as a means of "remembering" the subject''s social and conflictual character • The role of accounting in establishing "real" democracy at work and other domains of life • Accounting''s adjudicative function in international exchanges, such as that of the Third World debt • Antagonisms between the social and private character of accounting, such as conflicts of interest in the audit process • The identification of new constituencies for radical and critical accounting information • Accounting''s involvement in gender and class conflicts in the workplace • The interplay between accounting, social conflict, industrialization, bureaucracy, and technocracy • Reappraisals of the role of accounting as a science and technology • Critical reviews of "useful" scientific knowledge about organizations