Dubbed over: the struggles of Brazilian voice actors towards a worker-led AI governance
摘要
This article examines the struggles of Brazilian voice actors in response to the expansion of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) in the screen industries, and what these struggles reveal about worker-led AI governance beyond paradigmatic cases such as Hollywood. While existing scholarship has focused primarily on individual impacts of genAI on cultural workers or on policy debates at a macro level, far less attention has been paid to collective organizing, mobilization, and bottom-up forms of AI governance, particularly in Majority World contexts. Drawing on the power resources approach, the article analyzes how Brazilian voice actors mobilize institutional, associational, and discursive power in a sector historically shaped by weak unionization, informality, and global dependency within AI and screen value chains. Empirically, the study combines trade press analysis, policy documents, social media content analysis, and interviews with organizers related to the movement Dublagem Viva, the main association in the sector. The findings show that worker-led AI governance in this case is less about direct control over workplace deployment or sectoral bargaining, and more about reconfiguring the public and regulatory debate around AI through policy advocacy, coalition-building, and affective engagement with audiences.