Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI the resulting content includes people or occasions you’d rather not be reminded of. Importantly, with both the good and the bad, social media users haven’t had much agency over how AI shapes their expe- riences. About the most they’ve been able to do is opt out of various uses, such as turning off personalized advertising or those memories videos. What they haven’t had, until recently, are opportunities to use AI in the kind of opt-in, largely self-di- rected ways that tools like GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 enable. This is a theme I’ve touched on throughout this travelog, but it’s especially relevant in this chapter. From its inception, social media worked to recast broadcast media’s monolithic and passive audiences as interactive, democratic communities, in which newly empowered participants could connect directly with each other. They could project their own voices broadly, with no editorial “gatekeeping” beyond a given platform’s terms of service. Even with the rise of recommendation algorithms, social media remains a medium where users have more chance to deter- mine their own pathways and experiences than they do in the world of traditional media. It’s a medium where they’ve come to expect a certain level of autonomy, and typically they look for new ways to expand it. Social media content creators also wear a lot of hats, especially when starting out. A new YouTube creator is probably not only functioning as her channel’s on-screen talent, but also its pro- ducer, director, writer, editor, publicist, etc. The utility of AI is obvious in this context: it’s a powerful way for creators to amplify their productive power. But it also pres- 100