While walking this morning my brain mulled over the intersection of the gig economy and AI, trying to figure out what this new class of AI curation will look like for the precariat.
Unearthing the following conference paper last night fed my thinking this morning: “The Future of Techno-disruption in Gig Economy Workforces: Challenging the Dialogue with Fictional Abstracts.”
In the paper the authors provide a few design-fiction scenarios, including, A case study of gig workers as responsible moral centres of semi-automated systems, as well as this glorious bit of imaginary scholarly future research:
“Auto-writing and deep-research software enables app-tutors (normally academic staff and unemployed graduates) to co-write up to 400 student dissertations simultaneously, costing between £250 – £1100 per essay (Stuart & Shatner 2028, Teacheroober 2026). Academic support apps were banned for final year students at Sony TRUMP University in 2028. Research showed that these students have worse post-grad employment outcomes in the first month (Teacheroober et al. 2029). Here, we examine the impact of the ban on staff.”
Bates, Oliver & Remy, Christian & Nash, Callum & Kirman, Ben. (2019). The future of techno-disruption in gig economy workforces: challenging the dialogue with fictional abstracts. HTTF 2019: Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019. 1-4. 10.1145/3363384.3363476.
And then, while browsing the web at lunch I came across ANTHROPOCENE: An A.I. Opera by Michael Green.
“ANTHROPOCENE: An A.I. Opera” follows the story of EVA, a post human cyborg prophet, and BLADE, a security droid officer, and their survival after a major cataclysmic event. Blade arrested Eva for her possession of her FreeThought upload mind software, but the two were forced to work together after a swarm of meteors struck the Earth. BLADE takes EVA to the abandoned Biodome, with the objective to find their technocratic ruler, “NEURO”, in hope to reprogram his mission objectives, and build a New Earth Utopian model, with the use of nanotechnology, that will reign peacefully for the next 1000 years.
“ANTHROPOCENE was composed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The music was generated using A.I. software, where the composer has control over Articulation Melodic role, Dynamics, Register, Polyphony and Different Chord Notes. The thematic concepts of the lyrical content was pre arranged by the composer, and generated through the use of GPT-2, a text generating model. Once the lyrical content of the Opera was completed, it was fed through voice synthesizer software. The software synthesizes singing by typing in lyrics and melody.”
I expect we’ll see a lot more AI/human collaborations over the next few years.
I wonder when MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. will add citation styles for acknowledging which AI you used in the creation of your work.