Adaptation is the leading international, peer-reviewed journal of adaptation studies. The journal actively contributes to the development and visibility of adaptation studies as a field of academic enquiry and seeks to advance methodological approaches to the process.

Special Issue Editor: Reto Winckler (City University of Hong Kong)

Deadline for Submissions: 31 August 2025

Scope

Generative AI and its outputs complicate distinctions between human and machine modes of meaning, authorship, and creativity. Concomitantly, GenAI blurs the boundaries between artistic creation and adaptation in ways that will sound eerily familiar to any practiticioner of adaptation studies. This special issue of Adaptation invites scholars to contemplate the connections, imbrications and disjunctions of adaptation and generative AI.

The use of various forms of AI in creating works of art as well as artistic adaptations has a long history. But when the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT first made large language model (LLM)-based text generation available to the general public in 2022, making an adaptation became, from the human perspective, merely a matter of typing a few words of text and clicking a button. Ever since, AI-generated adaptations of works of literature, visual art, music and popular culture texts have been flooding the web. This special issue calls on its contributors to investigate the works and workings of this newly pervasive mode of machine adaptation and to consider its broader implications for adaptation theory and adaptation studies.

Concomitantly, this special issue invites scholars to flesh out, develop and critique the idea that LLM-based generative AIs are adaptation machines, and thereby to assess and hopefully demonstrate the utility of adaptation studies for the study of AI. GenAIs’ outputs are re-combinations of words and images produced on the basis of statistical probabilities gleaned by deep neural networks from a vast corpus of human-produced training data. That is, GenAIs algorithmically adapt human writings and artistic production to generate their own outputs. This special issue aims to contribute to recent efforts to establish critical AI studies as a new academic field by exploring how frameworks and methods developed in adaptation studies can contribute to a better understanding of generative AI.

While the focus of the issue will be on adaptation and GenAI, all contributions that tackle adaptation and AI are welcome. Topics may include but are not limited to:

• AI-generated adaptations of works of literature, paintings, plays, pieces of music, films, and other artistic texts

• AI-generated adaptations of literary or artistic styles, authors, artists, and time periods

• Adaptive human uses of GenAI outputs

• The impact of GenAI on adaptation practices and the adaptation industry

• The implications of GenAI for adaptation theory and adaptation studies

• Deepfakes as/and adaptation

• Algorithms and adaptation

• Recommendation systems and adaptation

• Studying GenAI through AI-generated adaptations

• GenAI’s impact on notions of meaning, creativity and authorship from the perspective of adaptation

• Adaptation studies and critical AI studies

Papers must be submitted online and will go through double-blind peer review before being considered for inclusion in this special issue.

For guidelines on preparing your manuscript, see Adaptation's Instructions to Authors. Submissions should be made to Adaptation's online submission website.

Papers must be submitted no later than Aug 31, 2025, to be considered for this special issue.

For questions, please contact issue editor Reto Winckler (City University of Hong Kong).