Generative Labour: A Study of Creativity and Work Mediated by Artificial Intelligence

Objetivo

The GenLab project explores the relationship between technology, creativity and work in the context of emerging forms of labour mediated, augmented and captured by “generative artificial intelligence” (gen-AI) technologies. In recent years, gen-AI has found application across the service industries, where it partially automates the production of media content, social interactions, or language. AI can not exist without human labour, but who “generates” what in the relation between humans and gen-AI? The project investigates the ways workers perceive their creativity in the encounter with gen-AI, how they perceive the collective nature of their labour, the role of automation in capturing their activities, and how they find meaning in work. To this end, it merges a critical technology lens with a labour analysis that centres workers’ agency and uniquely situated knowledge of gen-AI. The project introduces the concept of “generative labour”, which is founded on the idea that the generation of novelty distinguishes human labour, as well as on the view that all labour is inherently creative, challenging existing separations between manual, relational, and intellectual work to embrace an expansive definition of creativity. The concept of “generative labour” will be tested against 4 case studies across the division of labour in core EU economic sites that cut across the service industry, such as fashion, IT, contact service, and aviation, representing a geographical, economic, and occupational diversity of cases. The project represents the first comprehensive empirical research on the lived experiences of “generative” workers; methodologically, it experiments with an innovative strategy to study the materiality of technology through workers’ uniquely situated knowledge; theoretically, it aspires to rethink the interpretative categories for the study of the relationship between technology, creativity and work in the context of the new forms of work of the digital era.

Ámbito científico (EuroSciVoc)

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