Use of AI in creative fields continues to dominate public discourse, often drawing strong emotions from discussants. In this interview, Just Tech Program Officer Ever Bussey discusses the use of generative AI in art making with director and artist Michaela Ternasky-Holland. As a user of gen AI in her art practice and filmmaking, she argues that these new technologies should be viewed as tools that can help artists advance their craft.

The platform gig economy has grown over the last few years, especially since the pandemic, and it has reshaped the worker experience and workers’ relationship with consumers. This is particularly true for Black gig workers in the United States. In this essay, Jaylexia Clark examines how platform gig apps reproduce racial disparities by surveilling Black worker’s behavior and demanding Black platform workers to perform emotional labor, through the apps’ features such as customer ratings and feedback.

Meet Todd Whitney, one of our 2024–2026 Just Tech Fellows. He is a journalist and technologist whose work uses environmental sensing and community-oriented data frameworks to discuss climate justice. By building hardware and designing data collection methods, Whitney develops issue-specific environmental sensing and media projects that help others explore and advocate around their climate priorities and curiosities.

Theodora Dryer considers how the concept of “artifice” intersects with climate change and data tech, provides an overview of our relationship with carbon, and critiques how Indigenous lands were used to experiment cloud-seeding programs. Finally, she examines how contemporary environmental policy values and emphasizes certain forms of data while ignoring or undermining data that focuses on racial and environmental justice.