We are excited to share our report from our 2025 Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Pre-Conference on GenAI and creative labour! We are grateful to everyone who participated in the Pre-Conference, and to all the co-authors of this report: Tom Divon, Rafael Grohmann, MaryElizabeth Luka and Zoe Glatt. Please see below for the report’s introduction, and use this link to access the full report.

Since the landmark release of ChatGPT in 2022, followed by the rapid escalation of largescale models culminating in DeepSeek R1 in 2025, the creative and cultural sectors have entered a period of pronounced instability. The arrival of these systems sparked an immediate surge of technological hype, capital investment, and cultural unease. Generative AI now routinely produces synthetic text, images, video, audio, and fully multimodal narratives, making once-speculative forms of automation suddenly Commonplace.

As GenAI becomes woven into the infrastructures of cultural production, it is reshaping how creative work is imagined, valued, automated, circulated, compensated, and contested. Creative labour, already defined by precarity, platform dependence, and uneven global conditions, now faces a new set of pressures. These include the mass scraping of creative IP to train opaque LLMs, the acceleration of automation and deskilling across artistic and media professions, and the emergence of new hierarchies of expertise centred on computational literacy. These transformations are design challenges.

Beyond their technical capabilities, generative systems operate as sociotechnical imaginaries that reorganize expectations about creativity, expertise, and cultural value. They automate tasks, but also reshape how futures of creative work are imagined and governed. GenAI participates in configuring both material infrastructures and narrative horizons through which cultural production becomes intelligible.

At the same time, synthetic media floods attention economies, policy environments remain inconsistent or underdeveloped, and power consolidates further in the hands of a few dominant AI and platform corporations. Together, these forces introduce structural risks: the erosion of authorship and attribution; the deepening of existing racial, gendered, and geopolitical inequalities; the reconfiguration of labour rights; and the rise of synthetic cultural realities that destabilize truth, witnessing, and epistemic integrity, particularly in contexts marked by violence, war, and political suppression.

Across creative industries, workers, unions, policymakers, and scholars are grappling with a series of urgent questions:

• What happens when creative production becomes entangled with large-scale generative systems trained on unpaid, uncredited labour?
• How do we trace or contest the extractive infrastructures behind synthetic cultural outputs?
• How do GenAI systems reinforce or intensify existing global power asymmetries?
• What forms of worker resistance, adaptation, or refusal emerge when “creativity” itself becomes automated, simulated, or strategically instrumentalized?

It is precisely in this moment, marked by rupture, confusion, experimentation, and political struggle, that Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) scholars convened on October 15, 2025, for the ‘Creative Labour in Rupture? GenAI and Future Research Directions’ pre-conference. The aim was not merely to document change, but to collectively shape the conceptual, methodological, and political tools needed to study GenAI’s impact on creative labour. This gathering responded to three intertwined imperatives:

1. To identify how GenAI is reorganizing creative workflows, industries, and cultural imaginaries, from screen labour to influencer economies to global media infrastructures.
2. To analyze labour struggles as they move through formal and institutional arenas, including collective bargaining, unionization, regulatory debates, and legislative interventions around generative AI.
3. To examine forms of resistance, refusal, and reappropriation that operate beyond and alongside these institutions, including how creative workers, activists, and researchers carve out spaces for autonomy, care, and alternative practices within AI-shaped environments.

By bringing together scholars working across media industries, labour studies, platform governance, global creative economies, algorithmic systems, and AI imaginaries, the preconference created a rare interdisciplinary forum. Through provocations, roundtables, and collaborative synthesis, participants mapped a rapidly evolving research landscape and identified shared priorities for future inquiry.

This report reflects that collective intellectual work. It synthesizes the critical questions posed by participants, the methodological tensions surfaced in discussion, and the emerging pathways for studying creative labour at a moment when GenAI is not simply transforming industries, but reshaping what counts as creativity, labour, evidence, and cultural value itself.