AI hype, promotional culture, and affective capitalism

Abstract

This article centres AI hype within promotional culture. It incorporates scholarship on hype, affect and emotion from media, communications and cultural studies, as well as from market studies, to pose the following questions: ‘What role does promotional culture play in AI hype cycles?’ ‘What are the main promotional forms of emotion evident in the 2020s AI hype cycle?’ And finally, ‘What are the ethical implications of promoting emotion in AI hype cycles?’ The article explores the growth of twenty-first century promotional culture, particularly in the global tech sector, before examining links between promotional culture, emotion, affect, media and capitalism. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, the article contends that AI hype has successfully persisted because now, more than ever, contemporary promotional culture strategically deploys emotions as part of affective capitalism, and the affective nature of a digital media infrastructure controlled by the tech sector. The ensuing analysis isolates different emotions circulated by AI hype, including doomsday hype, drawing on examples from the 2020s AI hype cycle. The article concludes by examining the ethics of promotional culture as part of the combined knowledge apparatus supporting value construction in AI.