AI Worker-Led Governance and the Social Function of AI
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Existing AI governance frameworks have been largely captured by corporate actors, systematically excluding those most exposed to their consequences. AI worker-led governance addresses this gap by centring tech workers, creative workers, and platform labourers as legitimate stakeholders in the design and contestation of AI systems, treating AI policy not as a purely technical function but as a terrain also shaped by hundreds of workers' struggles through litigation, strikes, and collective bargaining over AI adoption. This demand for democratic participation is grounded in the concept of the social function of AI, which draws on Latin American legal traditions of the social function of property, where ownership rights are subordinated to collective welfare, to argue that AI systems built on socially produced data and public knowledge carry obligations that exceed private ownership.
Bio:
Kenzo Soares Seto is an associate research scholar at Yale Law School, where he serves as a research faculty member within the Information Society Project (ISP). He is also a fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE) at the New School. Previously, Dr Seto was an analyst at Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, a lecturer of media studies at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a visiting international researcher at the Lisbon School of Economics and Management (ISEG).
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