Nadia Piet + AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI / Better Images of AI / Model Collapse / CC-BY 4.0
As AI expands and becomes ever more entangled in creative production across industries, how can creative workers worldwide reclaim power over the technologies that shape their labour and their lives?
In September 2025, Creative Labour Critical Futures (CLCF) one of Art/In Forum’s Founding Partners, hosted the workshop ‘Workers Governing Technologies: Collective Strategies Across Contexts.’ The gathering brought together 20 workers and representatives of labour collectives from Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Mexico and the United States, and underscored a vital learning:
Technologies do not govern work on their own. They are shaped by social relations, and those relations can be reorganised through collective struggle.
In this insightful essay on CLCF’s blog, PhD Candidate Ashique Ali Thuppilikkat highlights important perspectives and inspiring stories of collective action that emerged from the workshop, from screenwriters organizing against AI, to gaming unions, to traditional unions and their negotiations with AI use, to digital solidarity economies.
Thuppilikkat’s article discusses how supporting worker-led initiatives and cooperative models is how we build more equitable and democratic futures.
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