From nothing, forever to something, never: a content analysis of social media posts on the “cancellation” of artificial intelligence

Abstract

While cancel culture has been taking shape as a widespread societal phenomenon in recent years, our understanding of it has typically been limited to individuals getting cancelled, usually in an online context. However, incidents of artificial intelligence (AI) getting cancelled have surfaced lately, and this challenges our prior notions of cancel culture. Since AI is typically perceived as lacking some core human qualities, it remains a doubt whether it can be subjected to the same sociocultural phenomenon as humans. Thus, this paper leverages on a recent AI cancellation incident involving Nothing, Forever, an AI-generated parody of Seinfeld to investigate how AI cancellation is discussed on Twitter. Content analysis is performed on 734 relevant tweets to extract the main categories dominating the discourse. The results provide us with more insights regarding how people perceive AI and other central issues such as who should be responsible for AI output.