Redundances and Stereotypes. Does the Archival Reuse Reinforce the Lack of Diversity?

This paper aims to investigate the link between the empirical reuse of archival material and the issue of stereotype. The reuse of audiovisual archives is an industrial process commonly used to fill the audiovisual space. The need for content in the media environment brings about the habit of reusing documents originally shot for other purposes. From this point of view, the automation of creation by generative AI is coherent with this industrial trend. Indeed, one could see the evolution of media as a fairly logical trend from technical reproducibility to the automation of audiovisual creativity. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that, far from being a trivial activity from a semiotic point of view, reusing content can result in the creation of stereotyped figures and, more generally, reduce the diversity of media representations.