"Artificial Spectator" Developing AI Audiences for Watching AI-Generated Films: A Speculative Exploration on the Future of Media and AI

As artificial intelligence systems proliferate as content creators, generating unprecedented volumes of media that exceed human attention capacity, we propose a speculative intervention: AI systems that serve as synthetic audiences. This paper presents "artificial spectatorship," a multi-modal language models simulate viewing experiences through emotional response generation, internal dialogue synthesis, and real-time facial expression rendering. Our implementation employs feedback loops between affective states and dialogue generation, creating autonomous viewing entities that process and respond to AI-generated content. This work challenges fundamental assumptions about attention, meaning-making, and the nature of aesthetic experience in an era where the exponential growth of synthetic media threatens to overwhelm human cognitive bandwidth. We position this as critical design intervention that interrogates whether machine-generated attention can constitute meaningful engagement, and what implications arise when both creation and consumption become automated processes. Requests for name changes in the electronic proceedings will be accepted with no questions asked. However name changes may cause bibliographic tracking issues. Authors are asked to consider this carefully and discuss it with their co-authors prior to requesting a name change in the electronic proceedings. Use the "Report an Issue" link to request a name change. Do not remove: This comment is monitored to verify that the site is working properly