Roundtable – Labor and Technology for Good

Alessandro Delfanti, University of Toronto
Generative Labour

Artificial intelligence cannot exist without the human labour it codifies and incorporates, but the recent wave of new generative AI (gen-AI) technology raises new questions about this bond. Who generates what in the relation between humans and gen-AI? Is human creativity dead, as many seem to suggest? In this talk, I will sketch out a theory of “generative labour”, proposing a new way to look at the relation between work, technology and creativity. A director prepares the pilot for their next shooting with a video generator tool; a customer service worker is guided by software that analyzes their emotional connection with a client; a retail worker follows instructions dictated by inventory software. In all these examples, workers’ generativity materializes in their capacity to produce new content in collaboration with machinery; their awareness that they rely on the past labour of many others, and that their own work will keep feeding technologically-mediated forms of cooperation; and sometimes their resistance to and subversion of AI-mediated commodification processes. The generative labour hypothesis is based on empirical research on the algorithmic re-organization and capture of labour from e-commerce to advertising, aviation, and video making, among others. It relies on a broad conceptualization of creativity and thus views all labour as inherently creative, challenging existing separations between manual, relational, and intellectual work. Finally, it sees workers as active–generative–rather than as the passive receivers of AI, unveiling the collective and embodied nature of human labour and creativity.

Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh
From Algorithms to AI: Why Worker Inquiry Matters

Considerable work has now taken place on the nature of the “gig economy,” and it has become clear that on-demand platform workers not only face myriad work-related risks but are also subject to a double regulatory gap: broadly, their employment is not regulated, nor are the technologies used to control their work. We know that platform workers often face endemic safety, financial, and mobility risks, which have been fomented by platform business models and the use of algorithmic and AI-driven management. In the absence of regulatory support, collaborative research projects involving workers and workers’ collectives have been at the forefront of investigating how to mitigate risk in the on-demand economy. Workers are making use of data protection laws and developing tools to investigate proprietary data-driven systems and are compiling and presenting evidence of algorithmic and AI-driven harms. In some cases, workers are leading the technical and legal exploration of exploitation in the platform economy.

In this talk, I will review research conducted by the Workers Observatory in Edinburgh, as well as by the UK-based Worker Info Exchange, to take stock of the value of worker-led inquiry into opaque socio-technical systems. Both projects illustrate how workers’ tacit knowledge of socio-technical systems is a fundamental starting point for understanding the construction of risk, as well for gathering reliable evidence of wage discrimination and racial bias in platform labour. These projects have also begun documenting the challenges that workers face in drawing meaningful links between their own research and broader policy regulation. Here, these projects reside at what been called the “micro” level of worker voice.

However, as “innovations” in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) stand to overshadow platform research, as well as recast working conditions for gig workers, this talk argues that worker inquiry is a vital methodology for understanding what matters both to workers and to the broader regulatory debates. Worker inquiry is also a link between what we know about platforms and what we will know about AI at work. As projects such as the Data Workers Inquiry and Planetary AI are showing, forging this link is essential to building solidarities across different groups of data workers and to raising workers’ voices to the “macro” level of regulatory input.

Kylie Jarrett, University College Dublin
Digital Labour for Good

The mediation of work by digital technologies – especially platform-mediated work – is often associated with reduced conditions, increased surveillance and micromanagement, and heightened exploitation. It is quite often and quite legitimately understood as anything but good work. This talk today, though, will take up the theme of the conference and accept the challenge of exploring how platform-mediated work may be approached as good work. Drawing on a broad range of studies into platform-mediated labour, it will initially explore conditions in which this kind of work is experienced as – or can be objectively understood as – a positive working context. By approaching labour through a lens that appreciates the differential effects of where and how bodies are situated in socioeconomic relations, this approach will challenge some of the assumptions about the always negative experience of platform work. We will then also consider the powerful imaginaries of good work that animate participation in many forms of digitally mediated labour. It will particularly focus on the mythology of entrepreneurialism that circulates and resonates in platform work contexts through its promised capacity to dis-alienate the labour experience and provide autonomous, creative, and fulfilling work. By refusing to accept the embrace of this imaginary as merely false consciousness, it will question narratives about the inevitable decline in the labour experience associated with platform capitalism. Finally, then, we will consider how these imaginaries might also serve as motivation for critique, struggle, and various forms of labour unrest. When the promises of good work are betrayed, how do workers react? Drawing this intentionally partial picture of digital labour for good is intended as a provocation to broaden our critical responses to what happens when work is entangled with digital technologies.

Emiliano Treré, Cardiff University; University of Valencia
Bridging STS and cultural studies: Investigating the contested morality of artifacts in the algorithmic society

This intervention highlights the benefits of integrating Science and Technology Studies (STS) with cultural studies to analyze the moral dimensions of technological artifacts. This approach, developed during the AlgoRes project co-led with Tiziano Bonini, which culminated in the book Algorithms of Resistance (MIT Press, 2024), reveals the interplay between design and use in shaping moral values.

Central to this discussion is the concept of moral economy, which serves as a bridge between the moral frameworks inscribed into technologies by their designers and those reinterpreted or contested by their users. Using examples from gig economy platforms, I will illustrate how moral norms are embedded into platforms through affordances and terms of service, shaping user behavior and reinforcing neoliberal values such as competition and data extractivism.

However, this moral framework is not immutable. Users actively reinterpret and challenge the moral scripts embedded in technologies, resisting through actions like mutual aid networks or hacking affordances to meet their needs. This negotiation of moral economies extends beyond gig workers to the algorithmic society, where daily interactions with algorithms—from content moderation to personalized recommendations—reveal an ongoing contestation of moral and social values. By combining insights from STS and cultural studies, this intervention provides a nuanced framework for understanding how artifacts mediate and reflect broader societal values. It underscores the need to move beyond deterministic views of technology to examine the dynamic, contested, and distributed nature of moral agency within the algorithmic society.