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Paper short abstract

Drawing on interviews with developers and artists, this paper explores how creative professionals feel the friction between embodied craft knowledge and algorithmic generation, tracing affective ambivalence as they understand changing skill, authorship and professional identity.

Paper long abstract

What is lost and gained when the hand gives way to the prompt? This paper draws on qualitative interviews with developers and artists from the Digital Work Futures project to examine how creative professionals experience generative AI as an embodied, affective encounter rather than a straightforward tool adoption. Building on Ruckenstein's structures of feeling (2023), the analysis traces how practitioners navigate a felt tension between situated craft knowledge, what one respondent calls “muscle memory for code,” and the convenience and disorientation of algorithmic generation.

The interviews reveal a spectrum of affective ambivalence. A junior data scientist describes feeling more efficient yet less competent, noting a subtle shame around AI use among colleagues. A conceptual artist distinguishes between text as an intelligence easily artificialized and embodied, sensory knowledge that resists automation — deliberately refusing voice interaction with AI to avoid normalizing what feels uncanny. Both articulate a shift from maker to curator, yet locate authorship differently: in the idea or in the realization, in the hand or in the prompt.

These accounts illuminate how professional identities are not merely disrupted but actively renegotiated through affectively charged micro-practices, choosing when to delegate, where to draw boundaries, what to refuse. The paper argues that attending to these felt negotiations reveals how ideas about possible resilient professional futures are constructed from within algorithmic relations, not imagined from outside them.