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Short abstract

This paper examines the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into academic labour (research, teaching, and service), addressing the challenges within the higher education sector subsumed under capital.

Long abstract

This paper examines the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into academic labour, addressing the challenges within the higher education sector subsumed under capital. Under the claim of enhanced efficiency, academic institutions increasingly deploy machine learning and natural language processing-generated AI technologies to streamline recruitment, admission, and performance evaluation processes, as well as to customize teaching materials and assessments. AI's (costly) 'purchase' comes both as a tool for administrative convenience and an instrument of surveillance and standardization, but as other recently embraced new technologies, it introduces serious concerns regarding discipline, control, and transformations of academic labour. The potential for AI to infringe on academic freedom, intellectual property, and worker rights through intensified monitoring and profiling activities reflecting and reinforcing intersectional inequalities are all critical concern. Yet, employing a materialist lens, the paper shows venues overlooked by most emergent academic literature on the subject: the enormous surplus extraction and value capture in higher education through formal and real subsumption of academic labor into segmented tasks that can be easily automated and outsourced, casualised, deprofessionalised and disembodied. At the same time, I show how traditional hierarchies, rituals, temporal and spatial dimensions of scholarly work make it particularly susceptible to such changes. Here, I also outline where anthropology stands in comparison/contrast with other disciplines. I thus outline potential venues for research and resistance, taking into account new vantage points of capitalist capture and their strategic choke points.

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Short abstract

The paper explores how platform workers navigate algorithmic systems in their everyday working lives. It considers how the ethnographer, through fieldwork, creates “algorithmic folklore” together with the research participants to understand the unpredictable forces of platform algorithms.

Long abstract

Platforms have become deeply integrated into everyday life—we work, communicate, shop, order food, and even find therapists through them. The term “platform economy” serves as a broad descriptor for various forms of labor mediated by these platforms (Berg, 2018). Increasingly, these platforms are governed by algorithms, placing workers in situations where they must navigate and negotiate their working conditions directly with or through these algorithms. This dynamic has given rise to phenomena such as algorithmic precarity (Chan, 2022) and algorithmic insecurity (Wood & Lehdonvirta, 2021). Workers who rely on algorithm-driven platforms to sustain their livelihoods develop strategies to interpret and engage with these opaque systems, forming what Bucher (2016) describes as "algorithmic imaginaries."

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with a diverse range of platform workers—including content creators, delivery workers, and platform-dependent creative professionals—this paper examines how these individuals attempt to understand and adapt to the algorithms shaping their lives. Reflecting on my own role as an ethnographer, I explore the ways my research also depended on algorithmic systems: finding respondents, maintaining connections, tracking their content, and tailoring platform experiences to suit my research objectives. This paper delves into how both platform workers and the ethnographer create and share narratives, beliefs, and strategies—what I term “algorithmic folklore”—as a means of protecting themselves and trying to stay ahead of the enigmatic forces that govern their professional and personal realities.

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Short abstract

Based on on-going ethnographic research, we will explore the implications of AI and algorithms on conduct of online ethnographies, in a sensitive issue as death. Does the use of AI, on-line memorials and chatbots help people in overcoming grief or do they prevent them from carrying it on?

Long abstract

Death used to entail a great deal of writing: sending letters or posting on newspapers to announce the death of a dear one. What happens now when the memory of the dead one is shared by 3000 facebook “friends”, who no longer write letters but post on social media? How does one feel when receiving a fb invitation for a birthday celebration from someone who passed away a while ago and became a “digital ghost”?

This paper focuses on dying in the digital age in Portugal, where attitudes towards death have changed immensely in the past thirty years; lately, the interplay of AI and death has accelerated the changes. People turn to on-line memorials to imprint the memoires of the departed beloved ones, but also to seek comfort in their grief. What implication does this have on ethnographic research? How can ethnologists research the implications of the use of social media on grief, as what was before written in the tombstones or in cards sent to the grieved ones is now written digitally in on-line memorials? Furthermore, with AI, we now have persons using chatbots and other digital means to communicate with their dead.

Based on on-going ethnographic research, we aim to explore the implications of AI and algorithms on the equity and conduct of online ethnographies, especially in a sensitive issue as death. Does the use of AI, on-line memorials and chatbots help people in overcoming grief or, on the contrary, do they prevent them from carrying it on?

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Short abstract

Ethnographers must adapt theory and methods to account for the growing presence of AI actors in online interactions and content creation. This paper emphasizes the need to move beyond simply identifying "real" humans online and instead focus on understanding how AI and humans co-create digital culture. The paper aims to explore the implications of this shift for ethnographic research and writing.

Long abstract

As global culture digitized over the course of the past decades, anthropologists too went online, following the now five billion internet users as they enact, negotiate, consume and create online. Such processes shifted the way ethnographers conducted their research away from embodied experience and interpersonal ties toward narrativization and more depersonalized data gathering. Ethnographers encountered bad actors, state-aligned manipulators, bots, trolls and every other sort of digital mask that made traditional ethnographers' problems (e.g., less-than-honest informants) seem almost trite. The ability of generative AI to produce believable text and images from simple prompts further complicates ethnographers' efforts to address subjectivity in online ethnography. However, ethnographic methods have proven resilient and reflexive, able to incorporate the agency of non-human actors (e.g., corporations, deities, non-human animals). I argue that AI necessitates a similar approach. Rather than seeking to delineate whether the subjects we encounter online are human or not, ethnographers must contend with and adapt to a digital world that is co-created with AI and algorithms. This is true even to the individual content level, as content is now more often created from an AI aligned to corporate beliefs and goals, prompted by real people with a purpose in mind and later modified to better fit that goal. This paper examines the politics and poetics of AI actors, offering insights for navigating a digital field increasingly populated by sophisticated non-human participants.