Co-Opting AI: Film will address how AI prediction and its burgeoning and highly capitalized industry shifts and changes the cultures and processes of film-making and consumption.

J.D. Connor is an associate professor in the division of cinema and media studies and holds the Hitchcock Chair in American Cinema. He is the author of Hollywood Math and Aftermath: The Economic Image and the Digital Recession and The Studios after the Studios: Neoclassical Hollywood, 1970–2010. He is working on The Image of the Social, a history of the transition to late capitalism in three diagrams; and Я/R: The Aesthetics of AI Audiovisuality. He is a founding member of Post45, a collective of scholars of American literature and culture and writes regularly for Flaming Hydra. His website is johnconnorlikeintheterminator.com.

Kate Fortmueller, associate professor in the School of Film, Media & Theatre at Georgia State University writes about Hollywood labor and the media industries. She is the author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production (2021), Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (2021), co-editor of Hollywood Unions (2025), and co-author of Boom to Bust: How Streaming Broke Hollywood Workers (2026). In addition to her scholarly work, she has published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Washington Post, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution and has served as an expert commentator on Hollywood labor for The Atlantic, The Hollywood Reporter, NPR, Variety, and others. Fortmueller is currently part of UCSB’s Carsey-Wolf Research Initiative on media industries and AI.

Holly Willis is the chair of the Media Arts + Practice Division in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is also Co-Director of AI for Media & Storytelling (AIMS), a practice-based studio and research initiative with funding from major institutional partners. Her work explores how emerging technologies are transforming cinematic language, creative practice, and the cultures and industries of storytelling. Bringing together artistic experimentation and critical inquiry, she is working to shape new approaches to AI that foreground human imagination and agency while engaging urgent questions of authorship, labor, bias, environmental impact, and creative responsibility.

The event will be moderated by Mona Sloane and supported by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, Sloane Lab, and the Digital Technology for Democracy Lab at the University of Virginia.