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Short abstract:

Many companies now market “official” deep fakes to perform customer service, health care, and intimate labor. I critically examine the racialization of consent and desire under such practices of generative AI, which I term “extractivist erotics."

Long abstract:

Drawing on analysis of Soul Machines, Replika, and other companies offering AI-generated “people” as digital laborers, this talk discusses the racial politics of affect and authenticity that haunt productions of so-called fake labor. Much concern has been generated about the harms deepfakes might enact, especially in the cases of sexually weaponized and political deepfakes. The crafting of deepfakes is only made possible by the ongoing extractive practices of artificial intelligence—where personal data is captured into public databases from which face-sets and other features can be generated. Such extractions are unevenly distributed across the racial topographies of digital capitalism, from the whiteness of images most over-represented to the non-whiteness of human labor moderating AI-generated content, from India to Kenya to the Philippines. Despite concerns over the regulation and moderation of user-generated deepfakes, many companies have begun marketing “official” fakes to perform customer service, health care, and intimate and sexual labor, often with the explicit participation of a celebrity and their likeness. Building upon scholarship critically examining the postcolonial and racial dimensions of digital labor, microwork/ghostwork, and outsourcing more broadly, I consider questions of consent, harm, and desire brought about by generative AI, which I term “extractivist erotics”: What forms does consensual data extraction take, and what new social contracts does it bring into emergence? What violences continue to be enacted to present the illusion of seamless, “artificial” intelligence-driven labor? And finally, what sorts of desires for authenticity, racial or otherwise, do we continue to demand from those who perform digital labor?