‘Para-adaptation’ reloaded: generative AI and the emergence of short-form AI adaptations

Abstract This article examines the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated short-form adaptations circulating on social media, with particular attention to their use of popular online storytelling formats as vehicles for reimagining familiar texts. Building on scholarship in adaptation studies and recent work on AI media, it argues that these works exemplify a form of ‘para-adaptation’, that is, playful reworkings of existing cultural material that simultaneously expose the affordances and limitations of generative AIs. Unlike earlier user-made adaptations, whose appeal often derived from their technical imperfections and aesthetic distance from large-scale commercial productions, AI-based para-adaptations appear both imperfect and ‘too perfect’, owing to their enticing yet often unstable synthesis of AI avatars, costume, props, décor, and lighting. By examining parody shorts that reimagine popular characters or narratives in novel contexts, the article explores how AI para-adaptations ‘disrupt’ the authority of canonical texts while satirizing social media practices, where confessional and banal infotainment genres dominate online attention economies. At the same time, the discussion acknowledges instances in which major entertainment and technology companies repurpose para-adaptations for promotional ends. Finally, the article proposes that ‘para-adaptation’ provides a valid framework for addressing these short-form AI adaptations and rearticulates the call for the wider application of adaptation studies to discuss popular culture, while remaining attentive to the field’s theoretical continuity.