Photos courtesy of Daphne Idiz
On December 17th and 18th 2025, I attended GenAI & Creative Practices: Past, Present, and Future, a two-day conference held at the University of Amsterdam that brought together scholars, artists, and practitioners to grapple with how generative AI is reshaping creativity, labour, and cultural production. Across thought-provoking keynotes, insightful panels, lively roundtables, an artistic programme, and a fabulous meal on the canals of Amsterdam, the conference offered a much-needed space for empirically-grounded discussions around genAI and creative labour. I presented two papers which are collaborative projects situated within my broader CLCF research focused on Exploring Generative AI in the Screen Industries:
✨ From the Talkies to the Chatbots: A Labour History of Technological Disruption in Hollywood
Isadora Campregher Paiva (University of Amsterdam) and Dr. Daphne Rena Idiz
This paper situates contemporary debates about genAI in Hollywood within a much longer history of labour struggles around technological change. Rather than treating the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes as unprecedented “AI strikes,” we trace continuities with earlier moments of disruption—from the transition to sound and the rise of television to streaming. Drawing on trade press and union communications, we show how demands around AI were deeply entangled with longer-standing conflicts over residuals, data transparency, and power asymmetries intensified by tech companies turned studios like Netflix. The paper highlights how different groups of workers experience technological change unevenly.
✨ CreativityGPT: How Workers Negotiate Generative AI in the Canadian and European Screen Industries
Dr. Daphne Rena Idiz and Dr. Nina Vindum Rasmussen (Independent Scholar)
Shifting the focus beyond Hollywood, this paper examines how screen workers and unions in Canada and Europe are negotiating the rollout of genAI in their creative practices. Based on interviews with screen workers, alongside industry observations, we explore how genAI is being resisted, adapted to, and sometimes strategically co-opted by workers themselves. We argue that the current “AI summer” should be understood in relation to earlier data-driven transformations brought about by global streaming, which reshaped power relations in screen industries. Inspired by “levels of automation” in automated vehicles, we begin conceptualizing “levels of automation” in creative work to ground our findings.
CLCF Co-Director & Postdoctoral Fellow
Daphne Rena Idiz (she/her) is a Co-Director of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) cluster and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC).
