AI, Ethics, & 
Creative Labor

Creative work is everywhere. The object in your hand, the interface you swipe through, the chair you're sitting in. None of that is accidental. Someone made decisions. Someone asked what matters, for whom, and with what consequences. That kind of thinking doesn't disappear because automated tools get faster. Creative individuals should keep making, because making is thinking, and it's what we love to do.

But something is shifting. As AI makes generating output easier, the real leverage shifts to discernment. To the person who can frame a problem, read a room, and take responsibility for what happens after something goes out into the world. When anyone can produce ten polished variations in minutes, depth and care become scarce. And scarcity creates value.

We started this lab because we heard from members of our creative community at Parsons School of Design that they want a seat at the table where these decisions get made. Not as subjects of study, but as people with expertise, instincts, and a point of view that no model has yet learned to replicate. We're interested in what happens at the edges: where creative labor meets legal rights, where automation meets authorship, where a smooth output meets questions that are worth asking.

The future of creative work isn't written yet. We think it should be written by the people who do it.

Team

The Lab for AI + Creative Labor draws on the history of design and the anthropology of technology to examine how AI is reshaping the conditions, practices, and politics of creative work. We develop empirical and critical methodologies for studying AI's integration into creative industries, investigating how automated systems interact with creative labor, artistic identity, and the distribution of power across creative fields.

Sareeta Amrute, Co-Director
Sareeta is Associate Professor of Design and Anthropology at The New School. She takes a majority world approach to the study and development of AI, as evidenced by a recent publication in the radical geography journal Antipode, titled "Thinking the Unthinkable in AI: Four Hegemonic Ways of Seeing AI and Five Majority World Ways to Move Beyond Them". Her first book, Encoding Race Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin, is the winner of the Diana Forsythe Prize in Anthropology and the International Convention of Asian Studies Book Prize.  

Aditi Dey, Researcher
Aditi Dey is a PhD candidate in the Politics Department at the New School for Social Research.  Her research interests lie at the intersection of politics, technology and urban infrastructures. Trained as a historian and a political scientist, her work examines how technology has shaped cultures of work, production, and skilling. She is interested in thinking about what the histories of technology and work tell us about the future of work, especially in the world of AI. 

Henry Schroder, Researcher
Henry's bio 

Andrew Shea, Co-Director
Andrew is Associate Professor of Integrated Design and Associate Dean of School of Design Strategies at The New School. His research focuses on design for social innovation and the role of artificial intelligence in that evolution. Andrew is the founding creative director of MANY Design, a studio that designs physical spaces, collaborative experiences, and platforms. His most recent co-edited book, Design for Social Innovation: Case Studies from Around the World, defines the global contours of the field. 

Advisors

Going beyond the application of rules or principles, we situate AI ethics within its political, social, affective, ecological, and economic dimensions. We approach ethics of AI from a plurality of perspectives, including traditions of self-formation and those that stress webs of social, ecological, and technical relations. We understand ethics as a world-building project that emerges from histories of domination that shape AI in the present and pushes past these frames to reimagine a relationship between AI and the flourishing of life.

Zed Adams
Associate Professor of Philosophy, The New School; Vice President, Technology

David Bering-Porter
Assistant Professor of Culture and Media, The New School

Pantea Farvid
Associate Professor of Applied Psychology, The New School; Vice President, Democracy and Culture

Jeongki Lim
Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management, The New School

Levy Lorenzo
Professor of Creative Technologies, The New School

Ayo Okunseinde
Associate Professor of Interaction and Media Design, The New School

Mimi Onuoha
Artist and educator; NYU Adjunct Faculty; Creative Capital & Fulbright grantee; Ford Foundation Fellow

Frank Pasquale
Professor of Law at Cornell Tech & Cornell Law School

Rory Solomon
Program Director of Code as a Liberal Art and Assistant Professor of Code & Liberal Arts, The New School

Contact

You can contact the Lab team by emailing sareeta@newschool.edu or andrewshea@newschool.edu

Equipping creative communities to investigate and shape AI

Andrew Shea
andrewshea@newschool.edu

Sareeta Amrute
sareeta@newschool.edu