As AI companies perpetuate the rhetoric that generative AI enhances efficiency and automates away drudgery — and pursue ambitions to automate everything from customer service to medical diagnoses — it is critical that claims about the technology’s capabilities do not go unchallenged. This primer integrates workers’ current and material experiences into public discourse and questions promotional language about the magical, infallible, and seemingly inscrutable qualities of AI. It underscores that AI does not exist outside of industries’ current economic conditions and their attendant inequalities and power dynamics. 

While media speculation has focused on whether and how AI can either “augment” work or drive mass unemployment, looking at the technology’s impact on different industries reveals a more complicated story. Generative AI and Labor: Power, Hype, and Value at Work shows that understanding how AI will affect work requires examining how work is organized, how industries are structured, and whose and what work is valued.