AI and the Future of Academic Labor Organizing

Higher education unions in the US are only beginning to address the impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on academic workers. This paper analyzes exploitation along the entire global AI supply chain to inform how academic workers can organize against it. First, we examine the use of precarious data annotators hired to develop and maintain AI tools, demonstrating how AI’s impact on academic labor is bound up with broader global struggles of digital labor exploitation. Second, we examine the integration of AI tools into the classroom and learning management systems for disciplining and rationalizing academic labor.

Lastly, we analyze the strategic implications of AI in academic labor organizing. With recent strikes in Hollywood and the East Coast and Gulf ports over AI and automation, we examine existing union bargaining strategies over AI in the EU and US. We draw lessons about how academic workers can protect themselves against extractive AI, control it, or even impede it while acting in solidarity with AI workers around the globe.