Stories from the Front Lines
Featuring Stephanie Jenkins, Umair Kazi, Rachel Robbins, Sara Ziff, and Aldo Juraldini Zorrilal
F(r)ictions: Creative Work in an Age of AI {2026 symposium}
Right after F(r)ictions' first panel, Stories from the Front Lines, wrapped, the five panelists, Umair Kazi from the Authors Guild, Aldo Juraidini from AIGA New York, Sara Ziff from the Model Alliance, Stephanie Jenkins from the Archival Producers Alliance, and moderator Rachel Robbins from Tangible Mind, kept talking. This video documents that conversation, the parts of the discussion still on their minds. Review the Symposium Proceedings for the full panel conversation.
What common ground can a model, a novelist, a designer, and an archivist actually find, coming from corners of creative work that rarely compare notes? Aldo returned to an image Stephanie raised on the panel, picturing a grandmother's attic and multiplying it by three hundred million households. What does it mean that so much memory and knowledge exists entirely outside anything a machine could ever be trained on? Umair picked up a challenge Rachel raised to the room near the end of the panel, not to assume creative workers are powerless against the companies building these tools. But is that optimism earned, or is it something these fields still have to build?
If laws and policy will always lag behind the technology, what fills the gap in the meantime? Sara and Stephanie both pointed out that industries like fashion and archival film were extractive long before AI entered the picture, which raises an uncomfortable question: how much of what gets blamed on AI was actually there all along? What holds the five of them together is a grounded kind of hope and the sense that the work ahead is not a new fight but a continuation of one they were already in.
At: The New School, New York City
On: Friday, May 1, 2026
Sponsored by: The New School's Office of University Initiatives
Video Production: Tatiana Stolpovskaya
Selected Works
We investigate how AI transforms the conditions, politics, and value of creative work.
