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Paper short abstract

This paper traces how work futures are enacted and felt in asymmetrical encounters between those who promote GenAI and creative workers in communications who navigate its promises, frictions, and embodied demands. It explores the relational dynamics between these future-makers and future-takers.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the relationship between everyday digital work futures and the professional imaginaries surrounding generative AI in the communication industry. It examines how AI-driven work futures are enacted, circulated, and contested between two groups: creative workers expected to use generative AI in their practice and professionals who develop, market, or educate others about its use. To theorise this relational dynamic, the paper adapts Barbara Adam's concepts of future-making and future-taking. Where Adam traces how present actions create futures that successor generations must live with, I apply the concepts to a contemporary, horizontal asymmetry: between those who shape AI narratives and those who receive them. For future-makers, AI arrives as seamless enhancement; for future-takers, it often registers as friction, ambivalence, and quiet recalibration. Yet these positions are not fixed: each group makes futures that the other must navigate, and tension emerges precisely in this exchange. The paper draws on a larger ethnographic study comprising fifty interviews with creative and digital workers in Sweden, focusing here on ten selected to explore this dynamic: five with creatives in communications and five with actors promoting AI in the sector. Using a futures-oriented approach informed by symbolic interactionism, the analysis attends to the embodied and affective dimensions of AI adoption: the sensory shift from making to prompting, the joys and troubles felt when craft meets algorithm, and how these textured experiences shape what futures become liveable.