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This paper studies the design of an AI tool that supports gig knowledge workers, rather than displacing them, focusing on text-based generative AI technologies. Through a formative study involving interviews and design activities, gig workers shared their views on text-based generative AI and envisioned applications where AI acts as managers, secretaries, and communication aids. Leveraging these insights, we created a generative-AI enhanced tool, Office-Mind AI, to aid gig workers. Our research advances the conversation around algorithmic labor by designing a worker-focused intelligent tool. This tool harness collective intelligence among workers and AI, fostering productive human-AI partnerships. We conclude by discussing the future prospects of collective intelligence tools designed for worker-AI collaborations.
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Scalar Devices of a Global Movement of GigWorker Activists: Nonscalability and the Possibilities of Proliferation
Scholarship in CSCW, HCI, and STS has critiqued the moral imperative to scale up and to value scalability. These insights have yet to be applied in the burgeoning research on platform-mediated work and worker resistance. Grounded in two years of in-person and virtual participant observation with gig worker activists, this paper undertakes an "ethnography of scale" to concretely account for how the activists represent and manage a global-scale movement. I argue that although the activists construct their movement as global, it is not scalable in the sense of being able to uniformly expand without changing the nature of the project. Rather, the movement's global scale can be seen as occurring through a process of proliferation, where scale is enacted through mutually transforming engagements. This paper contributes an empirical investigation of gig worker resistance by drawing on the concepts of nonscalability and proliferation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2240883
- PAR ID:
- 10567465
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400711145
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 255 to 260
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Gig economy transnational activism labor organizing resistance scalar devices nonscalability
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- San Jose Costa Rica
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3678884.3681860
