Akshita Jha, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Remi Denton, Sarah Laszlo, Shachi Dave, Rida Qadri, Chandan K. Reddy, Sunipa Dev. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

This paper reports on disability representation in images output from text-to-image (T2I) generative AI systems. Through eight focus groups with 25 people with disabilities, we found that models repeatedly presented reductive archetypes for different disabilities. Often these representations reflected broader societal stereotypes and biases, which our participants were concerned to see reproduced through T2I. Our participants discussed further challenges with using these models including the current reliance on prompt engineering to reach satisfactorily diverse results. Finally, they offered suggestions for how to improve disability representation with solutions like showing multiple, heterogeneous images for a single prompt and including the prompt with images generated. Our discussion reflects on tensions and tradeoffs we found among the diverse perspectives shared to inform future research on representation-oriented generative AI system evaluation metrics and development processes.

This paper examines the role played by informal mutual aid networks in mediating precarity for gig workers in Jakarta during COVID-19. Using an original survey of 350 mobility platform drivers conducted in May 2020 and a pre-pandemic set of semi-structured interviews with driver communities, I find that mutual aid dispersed through associative, informal labor networks became an essential infrastructure of support for drivers during the pandemic. Most drivers in Jakarta were able to mobilize pre-existing labor networks for extensive material and emotional support. However, results indicate this support was not universally accessible: the pre-pandemic structures of a driver's community and the driver's own participation within the community correlated with the magnitude of community support a driver reported receiving. By putting CSCW literature in conversation with broader literature on informal urbanism, this paper shows how informal labor networks and mutual aid can be a transformative, even outside of formal union structures. By analyzing the forms and limits of these networks this paper also carries lessons in how to build solidarity amongst distributed workforces. At the same time, this study highlights the role of local socio-economic context in shaping gig worker experiences of the pandemic. Thus, it points to the need for more contextually driven analysis of both gig worker precarity and what are deemed effective forms of labor solidarity

Jakarta's roads are green, filled as they are with the fluorescent green jackets, bright green logos and fluttering green banners of basecamps created by the city's digitized, 'online' motorbike-taxi drivers (ojol). These spaces function as waiting posts, regulatory institutions, information networks and spaces of solidarity for the ojol working for mobility-app companies, Grab and GoJek. Their existence though, presents a puzzle. In the world of on-demand matching, literature either predicts an isolated, atomized, disempowered digital worker or expects workers to have only temporary, online, ephemeral networks of mutual aid. Yet, Jakarta's ojol then introduce us to a new form of labor action that relies on an interface of the physical world and digital realm, complete with permanent shelters, quirky names, emblems, social media accounts and even their own emergency response service. This paper explores the contours of these labor formations and asks why digital workers in Jakarta are able to create collective structures of solidarity, even as app-mediated work may force them towards an individualized labor regime? I argue that these digital labor collectives are not accidental but a product of interactions between histories of social organization structures in Jakarta and affordances created by technological-mediation. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews I excavate the bi-directional conversation between globalizing digital platforms and social norms, civic culture and labor market conditions in Jakarta which has allowed for particular forms of digital worker resistances to emerge. I recover power for the digital worker, who provides us with a path to resisting algorithmization of work while still participating in it through agentic labor actions rooted in shared identities, enabled by technological fluency and borne out of a desire for community.