Google and Amazon employees, tech workers are protesting against the use of their labour in creating harmful technology.
The labour movement’s pushback against the proliferation of harmful AI systems is not limited to tech workers: many industries that are affected by the potential uses of AI systems have joined the fight. AI was a key topic of contention in the historic strikes by writers and actors in Hollywood in 2023.
Concept artists hired lobbyists and filed classaction lawsuits against companies that generated “AI art” using their work as training data, without consent or compensation. Creatives refused to accept studio terms stipulating that their material could be used to train generativeAI systems that could then put them out of work or devalue their labour.