Technical and Emotional AI Labor

Chinese digital-first policies have accelerated artificial intelligence (AI) integration across the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). While AI is promoted as enhancing creativity, productivity, and efficiency, the labor required to create with AI remains underexamined. Artistic labor scholarship recognizes networking, self-promotion, and entrepreneurial work, while AI-assisted creativity research emphasizes collaboration, authorship, and outcomes. Neither adequately conceptualizes the continual labor embedded in AI-integrated artistic production. Drawing on surveys and semi-structured interviews with independent contemporary visual artists in China conducted in 2023–2024, alongside systematic analysis of international Status of the Artist (TSOTA) policy recommendations published between 2018 and 2025 by UNESCO, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), and the International Federation of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity (IFCCD), this article develops the concept of technical and emotional AI labor. Findings demonstrate that AI redistributes artistic labor into continual cycles of software learning, prompt engineering, experimentation, technical maintenance, platform coordination, and emotional self-management. These activities are integral to artistic production rather than external professional development. Although international policy increasingly recognizes digital skills, lifelong learning, copyright, and AI governance, it continues to frame technological adaptation as education rather than labor. Reconceptualizing this adaptation as artistic labor extends artistic, digital, platform, and AI labor scholarship and identifies the need to update international TSOTA policy recommendations.