Dis/engaging the ‘common sense’ of AI: Labor strategies from the 2023 SAG-AFTRA around data-driven technologies

Forecasts around AI portray its intrusion into everyday life, relationships, and work as inevitable—as an unexamined, foregone conclusion, a type of ‘common sense’ around this technology that does not perform functions as well its boosters promise. In this paper we unpack the common sense of AI promoted by tech owners and the press to the public, business owners, institutions, and government agencies as it manifests in discourse around and contracts focused on generative AI in the 2023 Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strike and contract. This paper draws from science and technology studies (STS), social movement literature, and critical studies of technology to develop a spectrum of engagement with the “common sense” of AI to examine discourse around the SAG-AFTRA contract, and how the contract demands themselves respond – or fail to respond – to the challenges of defining AI as a subject that can be negotiated or refused in labor contracts. This spectrum of engagement allows us to better understand how the power to challenge the common sense of AI is and is not built through this contract. It also helps us draw out suggestions for labor strategies that enact intertwined concepts of reconfiguration and care from feminist STS to enact more powerful broad-based, bottom-up policy around AI and technology deployment.