Vol. 1, No. 2: AI Anxiety Attack

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Performance Improvement Plan

Performance Improvement Plan seeks to solve problems by answering questions about working in the creative industries. What’s vexing you? Talk to us: pip@softlabor.biz. All communications and sources will remain confidential and anonymous.

Dear Soft Labor,

I’m in my mid-twenties and work in a mid-sized commercial design agency—everything about the entire enterprise is pretty mid, to be honest. We’ve begun using a suite of AI tools to “ideate” initial concepts for our projects. Our Creative Director—the manbunned-and-bearded, Rick Rubin “Daddy” type we all know—is fervently evangelical about incorporating AI into our team’s process. Yet, I sense an underlying desperation in his enthusiasm rather than a sense of curiosity or even interest in the technology itself. 

I’m nearly half his age, but I can relate to his reticence, if in a different way: I, too, am skittish about AI as a somewhat recent graduate of a major art school who just missed the moment when schools began embracing AI. Why did I double-down so resolutely on developing my own set of aesthetic sensibilities, skills, and dedication to craft if my chosen industry is being transformed so quickly by AI—and the social imperative to use it lest we all “fall behind?” How can I retain a sense of myself as a designer when forced to use AI at work? 

From the LLM,

AI Anxiety Attack

Dear Attack,

While sitting in a post-reading Q&A session with the author Zadie Smith a while back, a Warby Parker glasses-wearing, Paris Review of Books tote-carrying youth inquired about what lies at the heart of your (and your CD’s) very concern: Will AI replace art as we know it? Like her or not, her nonchalance about the subject—she cited our favorite AI authority figure, Kate Crawford—and her smooth insistence that, to paraphrase, “no machine can invade the human mind,” is a position that we’ve carried with us while sitting through various university-level courses and workshops on the subject. (Or, as a UX designer pal at major tech company noted: “How are we going to be people together at work if computers are doing all of our shit for us?”) 

Attack, you need to find and channel your inner Zadie. This will be hard, of course, yet there is a difference between suspicion (or even paranoia) around or against new technologies—one that you can choose to relate to in any given way. Try approaching the relationship between AI and creativity with the sense of curiosity your CD lacks. Trust your own mind. (As another Soft Labor collaborator recently noted “Imagination is what’s going to get us out of this.”) Remember: AI isn’t even close to being a “new” technology.

So, let’s get tactical: Don't be a sad armchair critic, Attack. Learn your stuff. Try establishing a set of personal parameters for how you’ll use AI both inside and outside of agency life. (Soft Labor, for example, is written by a person.) Let yourself feel all the feels: Get mad over the ethical implications of Generative AI, from bias to beyond. 

Snort at the concept of AI “slop”—the majority of content we find online now—and while you’re at it, have a laugh at the Chat-GPT Miyazaki memes, too. Do your research. Don't fail to see the nuances therein. Read about and try out some tools if you're able to access them—we’re interested in Gemini, Flora, Deepseek, and Manus at the moment—and don’t think as much about whether you enjoy using them or not. Rather, interrogate their use value as if you were spending your own money on them—because you are being taxed by AI in one way or another, whether you realize it or not. (Or, as New York magazine critic Andrea Long Chu said in a recent interview, "If you're going to get paid pennies to train someone's AI, at least you should be doing as little work as possible.") Look at artists who work with AI—Holly Herndon + Mat Dryhurst and Stephanie Dinkins are a few exceptional examples. Write on paper. Read the whole book. Draw—like, actually draw—from life, with your hands. And when it’s time to “iterate” at work, speak up. Your CD’s anxious posturing is just that: Anxiety.

You—your body, your ideas, your interior life—are still here. 

Yours,

Soft Labor

Search Results 

“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests.

🔗 Follow Soft Labor’s Artificial Intelligence channel on are.na for a slew of more recent, popular articles on the subject, plus some academic throwbacks.

🔗 The MIT Technology Review just released its May/June issue, The Creativity Issue.

🔗 The Columbia Journalism Review just released How We're Using AI, a series of informed takes on the subject from a variety of journalists.

🔗 “Computers Will Not Replace Us,” the latest edition of Travis Diehl’s Spike magazine column, “Libra Season,” is a little bit mad. We still love Dublin.

🔗 John Cassidy’s recent New Yorker piece “How to Survive the AI Revolution,” is a perspective-check rooted in labor history. Joshua Rothman's "Why Even Try if You Have AI?" is also notable.

🔗 We’re currently reading Hito Steryl’s “Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat,” which drops from Verso in June and is all about the impact of AI (as driven by labor and geopolitics, the military industrial complex, etc.) on visual culture. We're also reading Irish performer and composer Jennifer Walshe's 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art, and Music, which you can read more about at the Unsound Dispatch or buy the book.

🔗 We’ve read a good bit of what academic Kate Crawford has written about AI over the years and as mentioned, she is our most beloved public intellectual on the subject—especially where gender and labor are concerned. Our best recommendations include: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and Planetary Costs of Artificial intelligence; along with most of her articles, which are gathered on her website. Her project Culminating Empires will be presented in the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale through November 2025.

🔗 Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I. is a 2024 book by James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant. There is a section called “The Artist” and the book was blurbed by Brian Eno, so have at it. 

🔗 The New York Times recently published an interactive piece called The Gen X Career Meltdown. We found it to be utterly histrionic, yet mildly entertaining. 

Progress Report

“Progress Report” updates readers on Soft Labor’s own work, as well as that of our collaborators and comrades. 

▶️ A deep cut from 2015: We organized an exhibition at the now-defunct (RIP!) K. Gallery, then on Broome Street, called Egress featuring artists Colleen Asper and Kate Cooper. (Here’s a pdf of the show's rather conceptual press release.) We were very much inspired by Crawford’s work at that time—and the way highly gender and race-biased (think: Sephora's “Color IQ” campaign) AI-driven technologies were and obviously still are informing the consumer market. 

Dress Code

“Dress Code” spotlights workplace looks of all forms and kinds.