What If We Ran Our Own Show? GenAI and The Politics of Representation

This article examines the politics of representation in the face of today’s growing audience fragmentation and the entry of genAI tools into televisual entertainment. Establishing that contemporary TV content is shaped by normative discourses on how to represent social difference, the article highlights how text-to-image/video models accelerate and amplify their mark on user-generated content. Conducting a walkthrough exploration of Showrunner—a genAI-powered tool to generate short, animated scenes with—it demonstrates how such models operationalize dominant constructions of how to appropriately represent social differences like gender, race, or sexuality. This brings a key tension into focus: Today’s broad recognition of representation’s political salience translates into functionalism and instrumentalization. By working to discontinue “inappropriate portrayals,” contemporary representational politics ignore pop-cultural complexity in favor of “actionable” dichotomies meant to regulate “harmful content” out of existence.