AI & Academic Labour: How unions should strategize about AI

Abstract

Presentation material for a special talk delivered to the Association of Academic Staff, University of Alberta members meeting. Generative AI threatens many different established ways work is performed. Academic work has not been exempt from this. How should generative AI be treated in the university environment? This presentation will consider this difficult question within the context of academic library work - often done ‘out in the open’, and potentially ripe for harvesting by A.I. for reuse in unsanctioned ways. Our recent article in the CAUT Bulletin looks at some tension points created by this dynamic. We imagine future collective agreement language to protect academic library work in an AI world, inspired by the recent contract language won by the Writers’ and Screen Actors’ Guilds to protect the labour of writers in film and television.