Rafael Grohmann (University of Toronto, Canada): Worker-led AI governance in cultural industries

This presentation examines worker-led AI governance, understood as the collective ability of workers, through unions, cooperatives, grassroots collectives, and social movements, to shape how AI is used, managed, deployed, negotiated, or refused at work. Grounded in ongoing empirical research with cultural workers across the Americas, the talk analyzes one specific dimension of worker-led AI governance. Cultural workers, especially screenwriters and voice actors, in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil are organizing in different ways to shape AI policies and regulations at both sectoral and national levels, in different ways. Their struggles include demands around consent, compensation, credit, and the boundaries of acceptable AI use, often under conditions of uneven visibility and weaker institutional protections. The talk maps the different power resources available to workers, including their economic leverage to halt production, their institutional capacity to influence law, and their communicative power to shape public opinion. It also considers how global dependencies deepen inequalities, such that a victory for workers in one country may create new challenges for those in another. By examining these different forms of worker-led initiatives around AI, the talk shows the lessons of collective organizing around AI in its messy and unfinished forms.

Rafael Grohmann is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Critical Platform Studies) at the University of Toronto. He is research associate at the University of Oxford, founding editor of Platforms & Society journal and leader of DigiLabour initiative. His research focuses on digital labour, AI and work, AI in the cultural sector, workers’ organizing, platform cooperativism and digital solidarity economy, especially in Latin America. He is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, a Senior Fellow at Massey College and an Advisory Board Member at the Centre for Culture and Technology. His previous affiliations include Weizenbaum Institute and University of Sao Paulo. Rafael published in academic outlets such as Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, Information, Communication & Society, and Social Media + Society. He is an editorial board member of Communication, Culture and Critique and Big Data & Society.