The Future of Creativity and AI: Views from the Scottish Creative Industries

Artificial Intelligence represents a suite of capabilities that every industry is currently having to reckon with: the creative industries are not exempt and may be one of the areas most affected by this sudden technological shift. As recently as 2020 the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre judged “[d]irect applications of AI in creative industries” to be “relatively small scale” (Davies et al., 2020). However, since late 2022 the arrival of widely available generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E has prompted all sectors to consider incorporating these technologies, and the ramifications of doing so. The increased prevalence of AI technologies has specific consequences for the creative industries, which are defined as those industries “based on individual creativity, skill and talent, or which have the potential to create wealth and jobs through the development or production of intellectual property” (Culture and Major Events Directorate, n.d.). AI as a disruptive technology has challenged understandings of creativity, skill and talent, particularly having a troubled relationship with legal structures of ownership and intellectual property.

In this paper we introduce the landscape of creative AI in Scotland in 2023, and report on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)-funded Creative AI Demonstrator Project (Feb 2023-March 2024), part of Creative Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, which consulted Scotland’s creative sector from May to November 2023 on their concerns about AI and how to address them. We provide concrete recommendations on how to support our creative industries through this increasingly urgent AI turn.