Uplifting the Workers, Shining a Light on the Invisible Labor Powering AI Technologies is a series of conversations to grow awareness about the human costs of AI innovation and to create a space where people in the cultural memory professions can engage in critical and caring discussions about the broader impact of AI technology. The series will feature workers’ rights activists, community organizers, AI data workers, scholars, and cultural memory practitioners. As the unrestrained development and adoption of artificial intelligence continues to impact all sectors of society, it is important for cultural memory workers to acknowledge the potential impact to our work but to also engage this new reality in critical ways that demonstrate our capacity to care for and advocate on behalf of vulnerable people. We must intentionally demonstrate our awareness of the labor exploitation, environmental harm, and other human costs underpinning AI innovation. And if cultural memory workers plan to bring AI technology into our work, we should be open to discussing how we might resist the technocapitalist agenda for AI use and be prepared to offer alternative models that are ethical, will not lead to the displacement of workers, and that will respect the rights of communities to own their cultural production.
Date/Time: Friday, May 15th, 12pm-1:30pm EST
Panelist: Adrienne Williams, Community Centered Researcher, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)
Moderator: Dr. Meredith D. Clark
Adrienne started organizing in 2018 while working as a junior high teacher for a tech owned charter school. She expanded her organizing in 2020 after her work as an Amazon delivery driver allowed her to see that many of the same issues she saw in charter schools were also at Amazon. Since then she has worked both on the ground and behind the scenes with activists, politicians, researchers, and everyday people to enact positive change in the tech, labor, and education industries by educating the public on how these industries harm, and how that harm can be reversed. She hopes her unique experience working within and organizing against these industries helps promote a more equitable society. Adrienne is a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with The OpEd Project in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation, as well as a Research Fellow at both (DAIR) and Just Tech.
Meredith D. Clark, Ph.D. (she/her), is a recovering journalist and an associate professor of race and political communication in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Her book, “We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives,” was released in 2025. She is a two-time graduate of Florida A&M University (B.A., political science, 2002; M.S., newspaper journalism, 2006) and earned her Ph.D. in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. Her work has been published in prominent journals such as Social Media & Society, New Media & Society, and the International Journal of Press and Politics. She has also received research grants from organizations including the Knight Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Clark’s award-winning dissertation on Black Twitter landed her on The Root 100, the news website’s list of the most influential African Americans in the country, in 2015.