Georgiana Grigore is Associate Professor in Marketing and Deputy Head of the School of Marketing and Strategy at the University of Leicester, UK. Georgiana’s research explores new ways of thinking about and practicing responsible business, particularly in digital contexts. She has worked with practitioners and academics across Europe on research and consultancy to explore how organisations construct, communicate and implement responsibility, especially within complex cultural or organisational contexts. She has published articles in journals like Annals in Tourism Research, Journal of Business Ethics, Marketing Theory, Organization, Journal of Business Research, Management Learning, Internet Research, Journal of Marketing Management, or Journal of Strategic Marketing. She is a chair of an annual International Conference in Social Responsibility, Ethics and Sustainability (ICSR), which she co-founded in 2012. Her research has received external funding, including from the Innovate UK, the British Academy/Leverhulme, and the Arthur W. Page Center in two consecutive years. She completed a doctorate in Marketing at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies where she used relationship marketing theory to examine the impact of corporate responsibility on stakeholders. Prior to her doctorate, she received a master’s degree in Strategic Marketing and a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the same university.
Keynote speech
METAPHORS OF SYMBIOSIS: WHAT SCIENCE FICTION MOVIES REVEAL ABOUT HUMAN-AI IMAGINARIES…AND BEYOND
How we think about the use of AI to achieve business goals has become normalised as a hyper-efficient and profitable ‘working together’ symbiosis metaphor. Yet public discourse and popular fiction oppose such a view with alternative critical and dystopian positions. We argue that in order to negotiate their own positions around AI, researchers and practitioners might engage with such contradictory views through the sociotechnical imaginaries captured by science fiction. We interpret 15 movies featuring AI to reveal multiple human-AI imaginaries and the metaphors that structure them. We find metaphors of: competitive symbiosis, where humans and AI compete for work, symbiotic mutualism, where humans and AI benefit each other, symbiotic parasitism, where either humans or AI feed off the other, and we also uncover the degree to which these relations are facultative (optional) or obligate (inescapable). Engagement with fictional texts invites sensitivity to the unreflective reproduction of dominant sociotechnical imaginaries and their structuring metaphors allowing alternative and preferred human-AI imaginaries to emerge.
