Julia Ticona Awarded National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to Study Generative AI

The threat of automation has loomed over the creative and cultural industries since the launch of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, even inspiring a months-long strike by Hollywood writers and actors.

To understand how this rapidly evolving technology affects these industries, Annenberg Assistant Professor Julia Ticona and collaborator Caitlin Petre, associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, have received a $149,970 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Titled “Imagining AI in organized labor: Struggles over the value of cultural work,” their research project is funded through the NEH’s Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities program.

Over two years, Ticona and Petre will speak to workers in cultural fields about how generative AI tools influence their understanding of their work and its social status.

“During the WAG [Writer’s Guild of America] and SAG- AFTRA [Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists] strikes, Caitlin and I were fascinated by the ways that creative and cultural workers were pushing guardrails for the use of AI to the top of their list of demands,” Ticona said. “Given the long history of labor unions pushing back against tech in many different fields, especially in manufacturing, we wondered how these very different types of workers were both imagining and pushing back against AI.”

Their grant will allow them to examine how evolving technology affects these industries and workers.

Through the project, Ticona and Petre aim to understand generative AI’s evolving impact on creativity, working conditions in cultural industries, and meaning-making processes around emerging workplace technologies.