Creative Labor in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI): An Exploratory Approach to Imaginaries and Practices in Chile’s Creative Industries (2026-2030)

Team

Arturo Arriagada (PI)
Matías Valderrama (Co-PI)

Funding

This project is funded by Chile's National Agency for Research and Development (ANID-Fondecyt Regular 1261490). 

Description

This project examines how generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is transforming the culture of creative labor in Chile’s creative industries, situating GAI within broader processes of platformization, automation, and the commodification of human creativity. While GAI promises productivity gains and expanded creative capacities, it also generates legal, ethical, and cultural tensions around authorship, originality, authenticity, and ownership, particularly in already precarious and platform-dependent creative sectors. Adopting an exploratory qualitative design, the study analyzes both sociotechnical imaginaries and everyday social practices through in-depth interviews, participant observation, document analysis, and digital methods, focusing empirically on the audiovisual, music, media and communications, and video game industries in Chile. By examining how creative workers and institutions appropriate, interpret, and negotiate GAI in their specific social and material contexts, the project seeks to understand how this technology is reshaping meanings, values, and labor relations in cultural production, contributing to broader debates on platform-mediated work, algorithmic organization of labor, and the future of creative industries, while also generating insights for public policy aimed at fair and sustainable creative labor.

Global Perspective of AI and Culture (2025-2028)

Team

Thomas Poell (PI)
Arturo Arriagada
Lorena Caminhas 
Smith Mehta
David Nieborg
Godwin Simon
Zhen Ye

Description

We investigate the uptake of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies in the cultural industries around the globe.

How are the use of GenAI reshaping imaginations and experiences of creative work among cultural workers, as well as among representatives of media corporations, cultural intermediaries, and local and regional governments?

We aim to develop a global perspective of AI and cultural production, offering valuable insights gathered from Japan, India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Chile (and beyond).

Cultural Production, Platforms, and AI (2023-2027)

Team

Christine Ithurbide (Head Coordinator)
Arturo Arriagada (Head Coordinator)
Matías Cifuentes (Researcher)
Catalina Laborde (Researcher)

Funding

This project is funded by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). 

Description

This study investigates the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on Chile’s creative industries through a comprehensive exploration of insights gathered from interviews with artists, governmental agencies, and AI companies. Utilizing a qualitative research approach, we aim to understand how AI technologies are influencing and transforming various facets of the creative process within industries such as visual arts, music, literature, and design. By engaging with artists directly, alongside representatives from governmental bodies and AI companies, we seek to discern the evolving dynamics, challenges, and opportunities that AI introduces. This multifaceted examination will provide a nuanced understanding of the collaborative landscape between human creativity and AI, shedding light on the implications for artistic expression, industry practices, and the potential role of governmental policies in navigating this transformative intersection.

This project is part of the International Research Network (IRN) SOUTH-STREAM, a 5-year research program funded by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). This program aims to lead a collective and critical reflection of Global South cultural platforms and digital players. 

Platforms, Music, and Musicians (2023-2024)

Team

Arturo Arriagada (PI)
Macarena Lavín (Researcher)
Ana Clara Tapia (Researcher)
Diego Olivares (Researcher)

Funding

This project was funded by Chile’s Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage (Fondo Cultura 728044).

Description

Global and local cultural production—developed by media, labels and musicians, filmmakers and documentarians, video game creators and digital content creators such as YouTubers and influencers—has become increasingly dependent on a series of digital platforms for the creation, distribution, and monetization of their creations and content. This phenomenon, called “platformization” (Nieborg & Poell, 2018), is not necessarily uniform across different cultures and markets. Global companies like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, and YouTube coexist with other local companies, as well as various dynamics of use and appropriation by creators and audiences.

In this study, we want to analyze the platformization process in the Chilean music industry from the perspective of musicians and intermediaries. Through a mixed-methods research design—which includes surveys, interviews with musicians and executives of record labels and digital distribution companies (content aggregators), and an analysis of the content published by these actors on social networks—we propose to explore the centrality that digital platforms have acquired in the production, distribution, and monetization of their creations. To this end, we will study the case of Spotify, the most used platform by musicians, labels, and audiences both nationally and globally. The conclusions of this study aim to gather evidence to understand the scope of the technological transformation process of the industry at the local, regional, and national levels, as well as to generate inputs for the design of public policies that enhance artistic creation in the current digital ecosystem.

New Narratives for Understanding and Measuring Platform Work in South America (2024-2025)

Team
Arturo Arriagada (PI Chile)
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez 

Catalina Laborde y José Toledo
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez

Pía Garavaglia y Gustavo Blutman (Argentina)
Universidad de Buenos Aires 

Rafael Grohmann y Julice Salvagni (Brasil)
Universidad de Toronto
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS)

Óscar Javier Maldonado y Derly Sánchez (Colombia)
Universidad del Rosario

Alejandra Dinegro (Perú)
Observatorio de Plataformas-Perú

Matías Dodel, Federico Rosenbaum y María Inés Martínez (Uruguay)
Universidad Católica del Uruguay

Eduardo Carrillo (Paraguay)
Asociación de Tecnología, Educación, Desarrollo, Investigación, Comunicación (TEDIC)

Funding

This project has been funded by Sur Futuro, Future Works-IDRC

Description

In highly unequal and segregated social contexts and labor markets such as those in Latin America, platform work emerges as a global phenomenon that needs to be addressed from a comparative perspective, intertwining technological adoption with historical forms of inequality and labor exclusion characteristic of the Latin American context. This project addresses the emerging phenomenon of platform work in Latin America, whose regulation and measurement are still unclear. It proposes an analysis of the social imaginaries about this type of work in the region and, from a common narrative, to establish criteria for its measurement and regulation. The project examines how platform work is imagined and experienced in seven South American countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay—as well as the motivations and justifications of people for participating in these activities. The project aims to understand these specific dynamics and propose measurement methods that reflect national particularities. This includes characterizing social imaginaries through interviews with workers and executives of platform companies and analyzing devices that shape the perception of platform work—such as advertising, jurisprudence, current regulatory frameworks, and official statistical data—to design questionnaires that consider the labor experiences of workers in each country.

Gig Work & The Platform Economy (2020-present)

Team

Arturo Arriagada (PI)
Pablo Egaña (Researcher)
Francisca Gutiérrez (Researcher)
Francisco Ibáñez (Researcher)
Jorge Leyton (Researcher)
Matías Cifuentes (Researcher)
Ámbar Santander (Researcher)

Funding

This project has been funded by Chile's National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), WZB, and the Oxford Internet Institute. 

Description

In this project, we investigate the various practices, experiences, and working conditions of gig workers in Chile. We analyze how this organization of work, facilitated by digital platforms that connect and manage the supply and demand for labor, is transforming not only the ways of understanding and experiencing work but also individual perceptions of the meaning of work in everyday life. 

This project is part of the Millennium Center on the Evolution of Work (MNEW), a multidisciplinary research network to studying the future of work and the Fairwork Project, leaded by the Oxford Internet Institute.

The Influencer Industry (2016-present)

Team

Arturo Arriagada (PI)
Francisco Ibáñez (Researcher)

Funding

This project has been funded by Chile's National Agency for Research and Development (ANID-Fondecyt), and Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez Research Fund.

Description

What role do these content creators -influencers, YouTubers, Instagrammers, Tik-Tokers- play in creating needs around goods and services from the local cultural industry? How do these practices and digital technologies contribute to the formation—and reproduction—of markets around goods and services? What are the identities of these "cultural intermediaries"? This project proposes to analyze the practices of consumers in digital spaces and the emergence of cultures and markets in the cultural industry through the use of the Internet. It starts from the assumption that these practices—and the role digital technologies play in them—make a group of consumers operate as "cultural intermediaries" (Bourdieu 1984) between the consumption and production of goods and services. By mobilizing a series of values around these goods, as well as representations of the social and economic world, these actors operate as key agents in the production and reproduction of markets.