I was asked by Professor Maggi Savin-Baden to write a short piece on this for the forthcoming Savin-Baden, M. and Savin-Baden, Z. (2026) Realistic and Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence. Florida: CRC Press.
In addition to AI’s ability to produce ‘natural language’ style text, there are also a plethora of platforms that can produce media such as images, video, and sound. For example, a request for an image of an oil painting of a landscape produces a convincing version of a work that doesn’t exist. At first glance, it appears that AI has made a successful incursion into the sacred space of creativity and the arts, but to what extent is this the case?
The question of AI and the Arts centres on our framing of creativity and authorship. What would be of more value, an image created by a named artist or an ‘identical’ image created by AI? We are attracted to notions the original, the scarce and the idea of the singular author. Once authorship becomes lost in complexity the value of the work diminishes.
The act, or the possibility, of mass production reframes what might have once been understood as creative into the mechanistic. By way of an example, I have two mugs I enjoy drinking coffee from. One is made by IKEA, it is a pleasing design and pleasant to drink from but embodies almost no cultural capital. The creative act of the original designer is disembodied-through-mass-production. The other is handmade, irreplaceable and slightly inconvenient in its design. The fact that I can see the fingerprints of the ceramicist, the artist embodied through their work, is compelling and confers significant value.
However, we should not frame AI and the Arts as the artist against the machine. The Arts continue to evolve, incorporating technology into creative processes, constantly redefining and extending what we mean by creativity. The need for a ‘creative’, the artist, to be involved always remains. A useful allegory is the game of chess. The computational model of the game has been ‘more successful’ than any human since 1997 and yet the game of chess flourishes. The relationship between the digital model and the players is nuanced and has pushed the game to new heights. The technology has been incorporated into the spirt of the game itself.
The problem in this debate, as with many emerging technologies, is an over focus on surface functionality and not the structural intent. AI is not a technological threat to the Arts; it is a business-model threat to artists. The plundering of work to train the machine is a serious problem. It will likely lead to less people being able to earn a living through their creativity. We risk automating the mediocre and disassembling our creative community.