Generative AI (GenAI) burst into the popular imagination in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT - a chat agent that has proven not only to be very popular but also signifies a major leap forward in technological capabilities. ChatGPT is just one of several GenAI technologies that has entered the scene in recent years; others can generate (or alter) video, images, music, dialogue, and computer code. These developments have the potential to change the nature of work for many, including for workers previously deemed immune to direct competition from technology. There is urgency to studying the impact of these tools in the specific context of creative work, in which technologically-mediated worker precarity is an ongoing but increasingly acute concern. Worker resistance, as exemplified by recent industrial action by the Writers Guild of America, highlights that impacts go beyond 'displacement' of or access to work, and can impact established notions of authorship while also affecting worker discretion and dignity. The creative sector is at the coalface of the GenAI transformation in which emerging technologies potentially devalue labour materially (wages) and socially (recognition of contribution). Our understanding of the transformative effects of GenAI in creative work is still emerging but present; the experience and perspective of those whose lives and livelihoods are increasingly threatened by these new technologies have not been properly factored into AI policy planning and change. What is needed is to bring these perspectives into view where they can influence labour policy in the area of data-driven technologies. To achieve this requires the building of new architectures that bridge this divide between experience and application and which promote involvement by building on the strength of UK labour law, comparable historical precedents like Scandinavian participatory design, and recent turns toward participatory algorithmic impact assessments. Algorithmic impact assessments hold promise as accountability tools that can surface core concerns about the effects of data-driven technologies while pointing towards governance strategies for mitigating those concerns. Where impact assessments are designed to foreground the voices of people affected by emerging technologies, they can also serve as frameworks for surfacing and crystalising perspectives that reflect the lived experience of technology-mediated lives, which in turn can be channelled into policy guidance. In this project, we bring together two leading and relevant methods of impact assessment: the Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law Assurance Framework for AI Systems (HUDERIA), and the Good Work Algorithmic Impact Assessment (GWAIA). The GWAIA has been selected as a focal point because of its specific application to questions of worker dignity. Its current design is relevant to algorithmic management tools within a 'conventional' employment context. We will cross-reference this with insights from HUDERIA, which brings specific insights with regards to structuring accountability in the relationship between individuals and technology producers, public and private. A central feature these tools share is the participatory engagement model of surfacing, assessing, and mitigating individual and collective risks to workers by drawing on the experiences, testimony, and ideas of workers themselves.

The recent mass proliferation of digital technologies means that people now live in a state of permanent connectivity. The effects of this on the availability of time, the use of time and experience of temporality for the individual and for society are presently unknown. The TIMED project will establish, for the first time, the specific effects of digitalization on time experience and the sense of temporality across Europe. WP1 will determine what digitization means to people, using a qualitative and quantitative methods. WP2 will use questionnaires to establish how the forms of digitization identified in WP1 affect the passage of time, time pressure and time perspective. In WP3 interviews will explore what constitutes free time in the digital age. WP4 will use real-time behaviour analysis to establish how digitization affects time usage and the passage of time during daily life. WP1-4 will be conducted in 6 European countries: UK, Germany, Spain, Poland, Switzerland & Czech Republic enabling comparisons across countries and cultures, and between people of different ages, genders, employments, levels of digital engagement. Finally, WP5 will use lab studies to establish the psychophysiological mechanisms through which digital engagement affects time experience. The TIMED project will provide a ground-breaking account of how and why the perception, use and allocation of time are affected by personal levels of digitization and cultural norms, and how this then impacts on quality of life. The information generated will enable us to, for the first time, establish how digitalization affects individual temporal experience and whether it is aiding the development of unified European temporal experience or enhancing existing cultural differences. The evidence generated will have significant implications for the promotion of health, wellbeing and economic outcomes through the mitigation or enhancement of the consequences of increased digitalization on temporal experience.