Smart Stardom explores how contemporary celebrities are digitally replicated and re-circulated through advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer-generated imagery, real-time rendering, and virtual and augmented media. Discussing how these digital developments produce highly compelling virtual versions of real stars – what the book terms the “smart star” – whose digital identities remain anchored to recognisable, real-world figures, the authors explore how these virtual celebrities generate economic and cultural value through familiarity, affective connection, and nostalgia, while also embodying urgent questions about consent, ownership, and the control of famous faces and voices. Drawing on a wide range of global case studies from film, music, advertising, activism, and politics, Smart Stardom examines how key figures are mobilised to help audiences engage with emerging digital environments, and how celebrity operates as a key point of entry into complex and often opaque technologies, used to authenticate new experiences while negotiating public anxieties around AI, data, and digital identity. Structured around the themes of image, likeness, nostalgia, and trust, Smart Stardom asks why celebrity remains vital to the adoption of new digital technologies, exploring both the agency of public figures in extending their identities into virtual spaces and the ways the global entertainment industry has expanded and exploited the appeal of licensed digital stardom. This book will appeal to researchers, students and scholars working in film and media industries, human-computer interaction (HCI), business, cultural theory, fandom studies, technology studies, sociology, and media stardom.
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