Lab for AI, Ethics, & Creative Labor

Much of what gets said about AI and creative work centers on the handful of names and organizations everyone already knows. In this interview, Richard Kessler, Provost of The New School, talks about the artists who never had that kind of protection to begin with: people composing jingles, shooting stock photography, writing poems on spec, for whom a shrinking market is not a talking point but a paycheck. Kessler raises the important point that AI systems still depend on new creative work to learn from, and wonders what that dependence might mean for creative individuals who are in the early stages of their careers. Watch the interview: https://lnkd.in/giBTZH4u

The first two panels at F(r)ictions centered on labor and law. The third one, "Alternative Models: The Small, the Specific, and From the Majority," included Sam Heckle, Ari Melenciano, Claudia Tomateo, and Taeyoon Choi, who discussed the days conversations and what should stay unreadable to a machine in the first place. Claudia brings in an idea from indigenous scholarship called "refusal," the choice to withhold rather than assume more openness always helps. Ari builds on it with a framework she calls "incomputable intelligence." Taeyoon makes the case that art holds contradiction in a way policy papers cannot. Sam points to the inherent qualities of struggling during the learning process. Watch their conversation and find their longer discussion in the Symposium Proceedings. https://lnkd.in/gySEi7NQ

Most of the day at F(r)ictions came from people who have spent years in industries that are being reshaped by AI. This next video features Henry Schröder (Lab member), Swasti Solanki, and Ananya Harshini, who were weeks away from graduating from Parsons School of Design - The New School, and who talked about entering a creative field at this moment. Henry pushes back on the fatalism that creeps into these conversations. Swasti and Ananya talk through what it actually means to use AI as a thinking partner instead of letting it think for you, and Ananya points out something most people overlook: that the legal rules shaping this technology look completely different depending on where in the world you happen to be working. Watch it here: https://lnkd.in/g38g_CJf

The second panel of F(r)ictions, Legal Rights and Collective Bargaining, dug into some of the legal issues: copyright, collective bargaining, and where the law runs out of room to help. This video captures what Isaro Carter (The Carter Firm), Andrew Foglia (US Copyright Office), Alexandra Mateescu (Data & Society), Linda Powell (SAG-AFTRA), and moderator David Carroll (The New School) discussed afterward, and their shared sense that legal tools only carry you so far. Andrew returns to a point Stephanie Jenkins (Archival Producers Alliance) made on the first panel about the duty of care creative industries owe to the past, not just the present. Alexandra picks up a thread about whether creative people think of themselves as workers at all, and why that distinction matters for organizing. David turns the question back on his own institution, asking whether universities examine how these tools reshape their own labor as closely as they study the tools themselves. Watch their conversation and find their longer discussion in the Symposium Proceedings: https://lnkd.in/gKCeCXhh

This next video from F(r)ictions, which took place at The New School on May 1, features University President Joel Towers, who steps back from the day's panels to distinguish the different roles universities play when courts and legislatures are also trying to answer the same questions about AI. Towers draws a line back to Walter Benjamin's writing on mechanical reproduction from nearly a century ago and points out how many of the arguments happening now are not new, but are returning at a different speed, a different scale, and a different sense of truth and truth-making. Watch his reflections: https://lnkd.in/gHQi_Xxd

The first panel of F(r)ictions, Stories from the Front Lines, brought together people from fields that almost never share a stage: publishing, fashion, design, and archival film. This video picks up where that panel left off and features Umair Kazi (The Author's Guild), Aldo Juraidini Zorrilla (AIGA New York), Sara Ziff (Model Alliance), Stephanie Jenkins (Archival Producers Alliance), and moderator Rachel Robbins (Tangible Mind). We see how much common ground the five of them have, despite working in such different corners of creative labor. One highlight included Aldo returning to an image Stephanie raised on the earlier panel discussion, picturing a grandmother's attic and multiplying it by three hundred million households, a way of pointing at how much memory and knowledge sits entirely outside anything a machine could train on. Another insight from Sara and Stephanie was that industries like fashion and archival film were extractive long before AI showed up, and that treating AI as the whole of the problem risks missing the rest of it. Watch their conversation and find their longer discussion in the Symposium Proceedings. https://lnkd.in/gjyy9VJ2

this is a great video with Zed Adams, philosopher and student of music history. watch it if you want to get into some of the promises and limitation of copyright w/r/t AI and artist protections.

New technologies tend to change how we see ourselves. Sometimes they give us a new identity to grow into, the way writing gave us the writer. Other times they give us something to define ourselves against, the way being called a computer used to describe a skilled person and now sounds like an insult. Zed Adams, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Vice President of Technology at The New School, works through that idea in this video. You can also read his welcome remarks in the Symposium Proceedings. https://lnkd.in/gmRUgEjP

The videos and Symposium Proceedings from F(r)ictions: Creative Work in an Age of AI are now online. Sareeta Amrute and Andrew Shea opened the day by explaining the title, because it framed the day: "Friction" as in resistance, the drag that creative workers are putting on a technology being installed around them, and the need for a more critical use of these technologies; "Fictions" as in the stories we're being asked to accept about authorship, originality, and what these systems actually do. The day moved from the experiential to the legal to the political, as they describe in detail. You can also read their welcome remarks in the Proceedings on the website. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing videos that from throughout the day, starting with this one. https://lnkd.in/gxqUGD5U