Co-Designing Collaborative Generative AI Tools for Freelancers
Kashif Imteyaz, Michael Muller, Claudia Flores-Saviaga, Saiph Savage

TL;DR
This paper explores designing collaborative generative AI tools tailored for freelancers, emphasizing preserving creative agency and identity through co-design sessions and proposing auxiliary AI systems that support flexible, freelancer-led collaboration.
Contribution
It introduces a co-design approach with freelancers to develop AI tools that support collaboration, emphasizing human-guided auxiliary AI to preserve creative agency and resist efficiency-driven AI models.
Findings
Freelancers are concerned about AI compromising their creative identity.
Auxiliary AI systems can support flexible, freelancer-led collaboration.
Design recommendations promote preserving creative agency in AI tools.
Abstract
Most generative AI tools prioritize individual productivity and personalization, with limited support for collaboration. Designed for traditional workplaces, these tools do not fit freelancers' short-term teams or lack of shared institutional support, which can worsen their isolation and overlook freelancing platform dynamics. This mismatch means that, instead of empowering freelancers, current generative AI tools could reinforce existing precarity and make freelancer collaboration harder. To investigate how to design generative AI tools to support freelancer collaboration, we conducted co-design sessions with 27 freelancers. A key concern that emerged was the risk of AI systems compromising their creative agency and work identities when collaborating, especially when AI tools could reproduce content without attribution, threatening the authenticity and distinctiveness of their…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDigital Economy and Work Transformation · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Open Source Software Innovations
