The Paradox of Automation: Generative AI and the Restructuring of Creative Work in South Korea and Taiwan
2026-05-15
【The Paradox of Automation: Generative AI and the Restructuring of Creative Work in South Korea and Taiwan】
Authors: Guan-Liang Lin (Graduate Student in Labor Law and Social Law, Graduate Institute of Law, NCCU) & Chiang Pei-Yun (Fourth-year Student, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, NYCU)
This event was jointly organized by the International Center for Cultural Studies at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, the College of Science and Technology Law, and the Post-Future Research Institute at Korea National University of Science and Technology (Seoul, South Korea). The lecture was opened and moderated by Professor Liu Ji-Hui, marking the beginning of academic research collaboration and exchange between Taiwan and South Korea.
Professor Kwang-Suk Lee: Transcending "FOMO" and Establishing Labor Agency in the Age of AI
During his 2025 residency in Taiwan, Professor Kwang-Suk Lee conducted extensive field research on the utilization of generative AI (GenAI) among creative workers, collaborating with the National Federation of Financial Unions and the Taipei Artists Union. His comparative study between South Korea and Taiwan argues that the impact of GenAI is not the widely predicted mass job displacement but rather an intensification of the precarity of creative labor. Both societies are deeply shaped by techno-optimism and a state-led economic model that views AI as a primary engine for national revitalization.
This technological ambition is accompanied by a disregard for the inherent social risks of AI, triggering unreflective policies and a growth-driven hype that has trapped society in a state of technological compulsion. This environment fosters a Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) syndrome, rooted in the existential urgency of losing ground in the global AI race.
Such institutional pressure cascades down to individual creators, where FOMO exacerbates job insecurity and psychological stress, ultimately threatening professional stability. Professor Lee’s findings confirm that GenAI precipitates multi-layered labor crises, including primary alienation through the extractives’ commodification of works for pre-training, secondary alienation via the taskification of creative processes that erodes autonomy, and the emergence of workslop, which increases the burden of post-generative production. To overcome this instability, he proposes a multi-layered strategic framework encompassing individual agency and institutional reform. Drawing on the 2023 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike as a precedent, creative communities in South Korea and Taiwan should mobilize collective bargaining power to mandate explicit consent for AI integration and resist automation processes that infringe upon labor rights.
Secretary-General Fu-Chuan Tseng: Cross-Border Labor—The Hidden Costs of AIs Restructuring Creative Work
Speaking from a trade union perspective, Secretary-General Tseng responded to the ways in which generative AI is transforming the work structures, professional identities, and everyday pressures of creative workers, while illuminating the shared predicaments of creative labor across East Asia. He argued that the impact of generative AI extends far beyond mere technological displacement of the workforce. Through mechanisms of data extractivism, work fragmentation, increased post-generative production responsibilities, and cognitive deskilling, generative AI is fundamentally restructuring existing creative workflows — giving rise to invisible labor, creative alienation, and a deepening crisis of suppression against workers' subjectivity.
Of particular note was Secretary-General Tseng's discussion of the workslop phenomenon. While AI tools may appear on the surface to enhance efficiency, they in practice transfer a substantial volume of corrective, repetitive, and evaluative burdens back onto the creators themselves. Creative workers are compelled to repeatedly refine prompts, filter and revise AI-generated content, and independently identify and resolve potential copyright infringement risks. This labor of "cleaning up AI waste" is often difficult to price clearly, and whether it should be counted as billable working hours or compensated accordingly frequently becomes a source of dispute. At the same time, clients' expectations of "one-click completion" place creators under mounting pressure for revisions and quality assurance, gradually pushing them into roles defined by prompt operation, style correction, and workslop remediation — rather than original creation.
Secretary-General Tseng emphasized that while the degree of AI disruption varies across different creative fields, structural pressures — including workflow transformation, professional deskilling, and efficiency-driven demands — are nearly universal. In Taiwan's current cultural and artistic sector, the regulatory framework governing generative AI remains largely confined to administrative disclosure obligations, subsidy restrictions, and competition eligibility rules, leaving substantive labor protections critically insufficient. He therefore advocated for more concrete institutional measures, including the mandatory disclosure of AI-related risks in contracts, the prohibition of AI usage metrics as KPI indicators, and the leveraging of union networks to connect the experiences of creators in both Taiwan and Korea — with the aim of building a transnational collective defense and rethinking how, amid the accelerating AI speed race, creative workers can sustain their own creative agency and original generative drive.
Professor Sangmin Kim: When Creation Becomes AI Feedstock—The Dilemmas of Creative Labor in the Era of Generative AI
As a discussant, Professor Sangmin Kim began by affirming Professor Kwang-Suk Lee’s perspective, noting that the adoption of GenAI subjects creative workers to a dual form of "alienation". First, the unauthorized use of creative works as pre-training data for AI threatens authorial identity and engenders a profound sense of dispossession. Second, AI automates the iterative processes of reflection, revision, and refinement inherent in creation, leading to cognitive deskilling and skill atrophy—phenomena particularly prevalent among precarious gig workers. Professor Kim pointed out that one's position within the labor market dictates their attitude toward AI; while senior professionals may resist, gig workers might embrace AI due to existential survival pressures, thereby accelerating the disappearance of their own roles.
Professor Kim further responded to Professor Lee’s research finding that Taiwanese respondents reported higher levels of job-replacement anxiety and AI-related FOMO (compared to their South Korean counterparts. Professor Kim suggested that since both Taiwan and South Korea share a new-developmentalist background—characterized by state-led industrial development and rapid technological adoption—these differences might not be explained solely by national development models but may instead stem from divergent labor cultures. He cautioned that while FOMO is originally a psychological concept at the individual level, extending it to the organizational or state level requires further clarification on how individual anxiety translates into institutional decision-making or national policy to avoid the issue of conceptual overextension.
Finally, Professor Kim noted that for individual workers to counter the challenges posed by AI, collective action and legal mobilization hold greater institutional potential. However, given the relatively weak union foundations in both South Korea and Taiwan, creative workers must explore how to forge effective solidarity in the absence of strong collective bargaining power. One such pathway is the organization of platform cooperativism to establish a fair working environment in the digital age.
Associate Professor Yu-Fan Chiu: Constructing a Human-Centric AI Workplace Policy—Where "Employees" Are the Most Important Humans!
As a discussant, Associate Professor Yu-Fan Chiu pointed out that AI policies in both Taiwan and South Korea often overemphasize the importance of AI as the lifeblood of economic development, thereby fostering a pervasive techno-optimism. Under this mindset, critical issues such as algorithmic bias, job displacement, socio-psychological stress , and privacy violations are frequently relegated to secondary concerns in the technological development process rather than being fully addressed.
However, once AI is introduced into the workplace, laborers may appear to be utilizing AI to enhance efficiency while actually losing control over work processes, judgmental standards, and labor outcomes. This erosion of autonomous agency causes workers to fall into a state of alienation under the guise of AI collaboration. Therefore, within AI governance policies that champion a "human-centric" approach, the actors who truly belong at the core are the employees, rather than treating them as mere tools to facilitate AI or serve enterprises and consumers.
In this context, AI governance should not only focus on technological innovation and industrial competitiveness. It must prioritize institutional spaces for workers' right to know, participate, and dissent, while further highlighting the importance of union participation in digital governance. To address the profound impact of AI on labor relations, we must move beyond pure techno-optimism and adopt a more cautious and critical stance. Only then can we construct a workplace environment that balances efficiency with dignified labor.
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The Paradox of Automation: Generative AI and the Restructuring of Creative Work in South Korea and Taiwan
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