Whose Future Is AI Building? Advocating for Artists in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
An artist, a new university graduate, and a software engineer walk into a bar— what do they all have in common? Many things I’m sure, but one thing I could bet on and it is: fear and loathing of the growing mass adoption and overarching narrative of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Nowadays, the subject of AI feels as commonplace as discussing the weather with your neighbor. It also feels as charged a topic as politics. Admitting you use chatGPT can feel equivalent to confessing you actively support polluting Earth’s drinking water!
In fact, the subject seems to span age, culture, and sector because of just how much the technology has infiltrated our daily lives. The truth is that whether we’ve opted in or not, AI is truly everywhere, yet many of the realities of how it works and what data it’s using to generate answers and art for us are hidden. Humans have long used technology to improve our quality of life; just as artists have long used technology to support their practice. So, why does this matter so much now?
AI works by being trained on data, our human data, more often than not, without our consent. And with current dominant narratives surrounding AI technology, the mass adoption of the technology is framed as if our use of it is inevitable and something we must succumb to quickly or we might somehow blink and end up an unhirable caveman. However, the mass adoption of AI is not something inevitable like gravity, but is something that companies and the people behind them are actively investing in and we need to intentionally regulate. This matters for all sectors, but especially for the arts and culture sector, where the majority of working artists represent small businesses whose artistic works and copyright are their primary assets for making a living.
Because of the direct impact this technology has on individual artists, Research to Impact Lab (R2i Lab) monitors both how philanthropy supports AI technology (and artists’s use of it) and legislative attempts at regulation. For philanthropic funders, we have developed baseline questions for understanding the technology and how to best fund it through an ethical lens, as in our October 2024 paper, Learnings and Ethical Considerations: A Resource for Arts Funders on Artificial Intelligence.
Recently, we had the opportunity to work with our longtime partners at Stanford University’s Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic (JIPIC) to advocate for individual artists by submitting a public comment on artificial intelligence and copyright to the California State Senate’s Privacy, Technology and Consumer Protection Committee. California is a hub for both technology and artistic production, and therefore provides an opportunity to be a leader in modeling new legislation that other states could follow. It was crucial to us to submit a public comment that represents the concerns of our constituency of non-unionized individuals in the arts and at the same time showcases the key learnings from our AmbitioUS initiative and their work with cultural changemakers and community ownership experiments. With this lens, our public comments make known the current power imbalances between big tech and individual artist entrepreneurs. It also highlights the need for heightened transparency and the importance of empowering creators to more actively participate in data governance.
Being an artist in our current society already has many barriers to entry, such as having the time, space, and resources to create and sustain your practice. As we’ve seen through our many years supporting artist entrepreneurs in the (now-sunsetted) Business of Art program, our current economic system also expects artists to not only produce works of art, but also hold the responsibility of running an entire business from finance, marketing, and legal protections. So, when we talk about power imbalance, we are speaking to the unfair reality that in our current landscape of data governance and protections, individual artist entrepreneurs are meant to go head-to-head with the resources and relationships of the tech giants of Silicon Valley. Our public comments provide many ideas for how to rebalance power, but a major theme we chose to emphasize is the importance of developing legislation that supports artist-owned infrastructure.
What’s Next? These public comments are part of a larger effort towards developing legislation that oversees artificial intelligence in California. There may be more opportunities to continue to voice our opinions and respond to their findings and reflections from these hearings. If you would like to follow along with our efforts in ensuring the voices of our constituency are heard, subscribe to our newsletter to stay abreast to the most up-to-date opportunities to share your first-hand experiences.
Want to go more in-depth in the public comments R2i Lab submitted to California Senate Privacy, Technology and Consumer Protection Committee? Follow the link below for the full public comment.
Beyond the Numbers
Measuring America’s Hidden Creativity
Art is subjective. What is not subjective? How complicated quantifying the people who create and support art can be! Complications aside, R2i Lab commissioned Joanna Woronkowicz and Douglas Noonan, Co-Principals of I/O Research (and also co-founders and co-directors of the Arts, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Lab and Indiana University’s Center for Cultural Affairs) to understand what it would take to take on such a herculean task. The result? Beyond the Numbers: Measuring America’s Hidden Creativity A report that “synthesizes what is known – and what remains missing – about the creative workforce and latent creativity in the United States.”
When we talk about our work at R2i Lab, we’ll often dance around the seemingly contradictory idea that as an arts organization, we’re not doing this work solely for artists. This is because in America, the ability to be an artist, even as a hobby, is increasingly becoming a title only the most privileged can pursue. And while this may make it seem like the United States’ arts and culture workforce would be small and easy to capture, that is not the case. Through this report, we’re given a snapshot into the various measurements and methodologies that try to capture the elusive U.S. arts and culture workforce in both formal and informal economies. From surveys and census data to other alternative measures of artists and their creative activity, such as through nonprofit tax documentation and measuring creative output from sources like Etsy and Patreon, the methods are creative, yet always have their unique limitations.
Alternative Ways to Identify Artists & Artistic Activity
● Nonemployer & tax data (Census NES; IRS Schedule C) reveal independent
artistic businesses.
● Time-use diaries and participation surveys capture paid and unpaid
artistic time and identity.
● Platform data (e.g., Kickstarter, Patreon, Etsy) proxy outputs and
micro-entrepreneurship.
● Institutional & local data (e.g., organizational payroll/contract
files, artist censuses) capture embedded and community practice.
The report shares how the COVID-19 pandemic was a catalyst for creating new, more inclusive definitions of who is an artist. These new definitions shifted focus from job codes to self-identification and artistic practice.
A highlight of the report is a glimpse into why we were originally interested in it in the first place: America’s hidden creative potential. Many of our experiments align with conditions that could unearth our society’s hidden creative potential, such as providing greater economic security. Ultimately, this report underscores what we know and why we approach our work from multiple sectors at R2i Lab. When people have the time, stability, and resources to explore their creativity, artistic and cultural participation expands far beyond those who can afford to take the risk.
What this report also showcases is that the challenge isn’t just measurement—it’s imagination. If our systems only recognize creativity when it fits neatly into job titles, income brackets, or formal sectors, we miss the vast majority of creative expression happening every day. We overlook the parent designing costumes after work, the teenager producing beats in their bedroom, and the dayworker who, if he had the resources, would sell his culinary creations full-time. These aren’t fringe cases—they’re the fabric of a truly diverse and creative society.
Read the report HERE
Becoming a Mother in the Face of America's Crumbling Safety Net and Obsession with Independence
“Children are the ways that the world begins again and again. If you fasten upon that concept of their promise, you will have trouble finding anything more awesome, and also anything more extraordinarily exhilarating, than the opportunity or/and the obligation to nurture a child into his or her own freedom.” - June Jordan
The reality of becoming a mother didn’t truly hit me until about the sixth week of postpartum, when I saw my son look at his own hands. He stared at them like an artist drawing a still life–taking in every line and shadow with a preciousness that made me understand the idea of a blank canvas in a whole new way. Then he looked at me with a deep stare that showed me a reality I was not prepared for: not only was I keeping this beautiful baby alive, but I was also shaping his entire world.
Working at CCI’s Research to Impact Lab (R2i Lab) for the past four years made me think I was prepared for America’s piecemeal lack of support for families during this season of life. Living it is a completely different experience. Juggling Post-Partum Depression (PPD), a newborn, and physical disabilities from labor, all while trying to understand the archaic website of the state’s Employee Development Department, was its own special version of hell– and somehow California, where I live, has one of the most generous maternity leave programs in the country. I never felt the need for a village more– and yet, I, like many birthing people, was alone. It is no wonder that, on average, 1 in 8 birthing people experience PPD in America (Langdon and Carberg), with an estimated 50% of cases remaining undiagnosed due to cultural stigma (Carlson and Azhar).
While I was shocked by the reality of just how truly bad America’s system of support for parents is, it did not shift my point of view and identity as the following discoveries have. Surprisingly, the most influential learnings from my matrescence are rooted in many of the ideas we work with at CCI – culture and systems change.
America’s Culture of Independence and Hyper-Individualism Starts on Day One
Motherhood has shown me that independence and hyper-individualism start as early as when parents are told not to hold their babies too much and are encouraged to sleep train. It continues in the form of a threat that somehow if your child becomes “dependent” on you, you have failed to ready them to pull up their bootstraps and work hard for individual success in America. At R2i Lab, we often find ourselves fighting against the loneliness America normalizes as “independence” through convenings and investing in relational infrastructure. Just as we aim to support innovations that center on mutualism and collective future-building, it dawned on me how deeply rooted this individualist culture battle is in America, as the indoctrination of independence and individualism begins as early as infancy.
Policy Failures Feel Like Personal Ones
For both artists and families, the sad reality is that we often blame ourselves for what are actually policy failures. We think: if we could only manage our time better, then we would be better parents or finally have time to create our artwork. Becoming a mother made me see just how much policy failures are disguised with narratives that put the onus on us. With the median annual cost of full-time child care for a preschool-age child ranging between $9,000 and $24,000 and for infant care, ranging between $11,000 and $29,000, (Danielson et al.) it is not our fault that childcare is so expensive or that the workday ends hours after the school day. There is no amount of girlboss-ing possible for us to “have it all.”
It Takes a Village, Not a Family
American individualist culture extends from a single person to the creation of the nuclear family, which shoulders what villages used to provide. Systems that prioritize nuclear families created fences where shared resources used to be, replaced intergenerational support with paid nursing homes and nannies, and collectivism with independence. Motherhood has taught me that isolating people into nuclear families is a tool, and that community is the answer. A tool for what, you might ask? Isolation keeps people from organizing for change. This is true for the crushing weight of responsibility that keeps families struggling in isolation, and it is true for many of the movements we seek to support at R2i Lab. For this reason, we approach our work through a lens beyond issues that only impact artists, but instead to all workers experiencing gig-working conditions. Community and connecting on shared struggles are the bridge that turns isolated pain into a fight for justice.
Three months into my PPD, I started the Circle for Radical Mothering 1 a group for birthing people to build the village they deserve, grounded in values of feminism, social justice, and decolonization. This group provides me with a dedicated space to live my values and mother in a way that breaks from America’s dominant culture.
To Be Able to Imagine Yourself Out of the Current System, You Must Remove Yourself From It
Finally, one of the most difficult-to-swallow learnings from my matresence is the importance of removing oneself from the systems you’re trying to dismantle in order to imagine possibilities outside of them. Why was this reflection particularly important for me at this moment? Because it helped me come to a difficult personal decision of my own.
When the time came to return to work, I sat with the learnings I’ve just shared, and I perceived two paths in front of me: one in which I leap back into the urgency of capitalism and hand my son off in the name of “American independence”, or I could try a different path, unknown to me and grounded in experimentation. I decided to take the opportunity to shape my son’s world into one I have been fighting to build. As of February 2026, I stepped away from my full-time role as Program Officer, Research to Impact Lab, and into an as-needed part-time Special Projects Officer, Research to Impact Lab. I am grateful for my colleague’s collaboration and support as I explore the path of embodied activism through my mothering.
At CCI, we aim to support “worldbuilding,” a term that describes how many of our grantees work to build the world they want in the face of a current world built on histories and systems of power that actively work to erase them. In this new chapter, I aim to embody worldbuilding through my mothering, grounding my son’s early world in connection over isolation, collective futures over independent success, and slowness in the face of urgency. Coming to this decision was not easy, and took plenty of internal reflection and interrogation for what it would take to do this, such as leaning on my community, unlearning how I see my worth, and embracing the unknown.
My learnings and my own personal choice have led me to what I never thought: being primarily a stay-at-home parent. However, I am not here to advocate for all parents to stay at home with their children. I’m advocating for a culture that values the time and labor it takes to raise children, and for policies that allow people to do so intentionally and in community, should they choose to. My hope is also to showcase the role culture plays in our collective fight towards justice.
As I settle into this new relationship with CCI, I look forward to continued experimentation and to welcoming our next Program Officer for Research to Impact Lab. The relationships I’ve made and nurtured during my time in this program have had a profound impact on my personal activism and will continue to inspire me as I support both this program and my new identity as a mother.
1Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines defines and reclaims the term “mothering” not as a biological act, but as a crucial, subversive, and collective social practice that works to dismantle capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. It is distinctly different from “motherhood” and is an action people of all gender identities perform. The term has also been reclaimed in Audre Lorde’s essay, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger” where she asserts the need to mother ourselves as a way to expand the verb to encompass the act of reparenting oneself.
Works Cited
Carlson, Karen, and Yusra Azhar. “Perinatal Depression – StatPearls – NCBI Bookshelf.” NCBI, National Library of Medicine, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519070/. Accessed 15 March 2026.
Danielson, Caroline, et al. “California’s Changing Child Care Landscape: Understanding Costs and Supply.” PPIC, 1 August 2025, https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-changing-child-care-landscape-understanding-costs-and-supply/. Accessed 15 March 2026.
Langdon, Kimberly, and Jenna Carberg. “Postpartum Depression Statistics (2025) | PPD Research & Data.” Postpartum Depression, 4 August 2025, https://www.postpartumdepression.org/resources/statistics/. Accessed 15 March 2026.