Dear friends,

As many of us prepare to gather again for AoIR 2026 (yay!), we wanted to revisit a conversation that began at AoIR 2025 in Brazil and will continue in Mexico, now captured in our report: Creative Labour in Rupture? GenAI & Future Research Directions.

Last October, we brought together 50 scholars for our AoIR pre-conference centered on Creative Labour in Rupture to think collectively about what GenAI is changing across creative labour and cultural production, how we might study those transformations, and what questions should guide the next phase of research.

The report (linked below) opens with provocations from Arturo Arriagada, Robert Prey, Alessandro Gandini, Daphne Idiz, Thomas Poell, David Nieborg, Godwin Simon, Jiaru Tang, Caitlin Petre, Rafael Grohmann, M.E. Luka, and Tom Divon. It then brings together the voices of all 50 scholars in the room through three lenses: Ruptures, Reactions, and Resistances. 

The report is a shared baby of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF), DigiLabour, and the Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN). We hope it can serve as a resource for any of you who wish to carry these conversations forward, for research, teaching, and for thinking together about where scholarship on GenAI and creative labour needs to go next.

And to make that continuation more practical, we have also built a collaborative reading list on GenAI and creative labour, drawing on the references and intellectual traditions brought into the room in Rio. The list is designed to stay open and evolve with the field, and we warmly invite you to add your own work, reports, or anything you’ve read and haven’t been able to shut up about.

Read and use the full report:
Creative Labour in Rupture? GenAI & Future Research Directions - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1srOcSNmdy4n_vFefM4Cfgu5I3zGObPUd/view?usp=sharing

Explore and contribute to the living reading list:
GenAI & Creative Labour | Reading List - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VWE5Bp9_92bjE4dIdO5rpwJkkcBC6P8UR2wXL2FjDNw/edit?tab=t.0

Check out our sites (we provide more useful resources there!)

Tom Divon, Rafael Grohmann, M.E. Luka & Zoe Glatt