On Being a Robot: Aesthesis and Sense in Audio Transcription for AI Projects

This essay contends that the secrecy surrounding AI data work feeds into a multifaceted disruption of the dynamics of sense in contemporary cultures permeated by AI technologies. Starting from my personal experience as an audio transcriber for AI projects, I propose a situated account of the alienation of workers from the meaning of their labor and of their increasing reduction to being obedient robots. The capability of AI technologies to perform tasks hitherto reserved for “human” workers is grounded, at least in part, in the reduction of labor to simple algorithms. Subsequently, I argue for valuing the imaginary experiences that emerge for transcribers in the labor process as artworks in their own right, as aesthetic events that glitch the logic of the work-entertainment system that they are inscribed in. These imaginary experiences reclaim sense, not as a stable means of orientation, but as a multiplicity of useless (dis)orienting vectors.