CAI SPECIAL SERIES CFP: AI’s Cultures of Value

Special Topic Series in Critical AI

AI’s Cultures of Value

Series Editor Michael Szalay (UC Irvine)

For centuries, utopian thought has imagined machines taking over society’s dull or dangerous work and leaving humans free for those valued endeavors that make life worth living. But generative AI (and “AI” more generally) now threaten some of what has been considered the most meaningful work, while leaving the most grueling labors stubbornly, cheaply human. And as generative AI (gen AI) gets better at simulating human production at its most artful, analytic, and intellectual, the AI industry sets out to “optimize” the conditions under which people work, live and love, changing in the process not simply what they value about work, or in human intimacy, sociality, art, and culture, but also the principles and practices through which they value. This special issue cluster calls on authors across disciplines and periods to interrogate this transvaluation of values, by asking whether and how AI technologies are introducing new protocols, rhetorics, incentives, media, creative practices, and human-machine assemblages that alter (socio-technically, onto-epistemically, and/or aesthetically) existing cultures of value and that may condition or even overdetermine the new regimes of value that could replace them.   

Interdisciplinary scholarship has plumbed gen AI’s potential to automate knowledge work in domains such as research, teaching, software development, law, medicine, data analysis, and entertainment. Much of that attention focuses on the macroeconomic implications of a technology that purports to change fundamentally the nature of the labor market (who gets to enter it, and who may face obsolescence or immiseration as a result). This special issue cluster welcomes further insights into the political economy of gen AI (and of AI more generally). But the cluster’s expanded focus also invites reflection on the subjective, qualitative, ethical, aesthetic, and ideological consequences of such politico-economic and sociotechnical changes. How do AI technologies—especially the large language model (LLM)-based applications and chatbot implementations that constitute gen AI as we know it—now precipitate a transvaluation of the meaning and significance of manifold kinds of work; the self-understanding and perceived worth of vocations, crafts, and creative practices; and the valorized practices and principles that constitute the “good life” generally?

Critical accounts of gen AI’s impacts have stressed the limitations of so-called value “alignment” (e.g., Moats and Ruckenstein forthcoming) and argued that gen AI does not straightforwardly implement so much as actively transform values. “AI’s Cultures of Value” seeks work that asks, in this spirit, how, why, and through what technical infrastructures AI technologies engage and transform values and value systems. This might include gen AI’s demonstrable tendencies to “deskill” or “never-skill” human workers and to proletarianize knowledge work; to introduce regimes of surveillance and quantitative metricization; to constitute new layers of invisible, discounted labor (often located in the global south); or to hollow out craft, professional, and creative cultures (including hitherto thriving online cultures that are increasingly dominated by “AI slop” or sidelined by synthetic content). How do automated technologies transform aesthetic tastes and traditions, whether through hyper-personalized recommendation algorithms or the simulation of technical mastery, as they relocate or displace the human creator? What is the impact on friendship and intimacy, as synthetic companions offer frictionless emotional validation on demand, in the absence of conflict or reciprocity. How does civic life change as gen AI mimics procedural competence and/or propagates incipiently fascistic modes of relationality and emotional cathexis. Will valuations of work itself change from longstanding ideological structures such as Weber’s approval of the ascetic over the complacent, the market’s embrace of (male) productive and waged labor over (female) reproductive and unwaged labor, or racial capitalism’s foundational distinction between the “free” and the enslaved?  Could gen AI and related technologies alter the individual and collective experience and valuation of work and leisure?

“AI’s Cultures of Value” invites contributions from artists, activists, Luddites, writers, designers, caregivers, scholars, or educators—including those whose own cultures of value appeal to the public good, community-building, democratic processes, or the intrinsic rewards of work. Multiple critical perspectives are welcome including (but not limited to) moral philosophy, anthropology, literary studies, linguistics, history of technology, Marxist theory, critical data studies, feminism, ecocriticism, disability studies, posthumanism, media and network theory, translation studies, Indigenous studies, Afrofuturism, and decolonial studies.

Logistics and parameters for submission:

In line with Critical AI’s editorial practice, this series welcomes essays (up to 8,000 words including footnotes) and shorter think pieces (usually 4000 words or fewer) on a rolling basis. We value interdisciplinarity (as well as work from outside the academy), so long as the work is legible to readers in any discipline. Please see our submission guidelines including strong preference for articles published in a humanities style that do not rehearse arguments about AI technologies that are already familiar to the journal’s readers.