Automating creative practices: socio-technical imaginaries for the future of creative work

Ashton, Daniel (2022) Automating creative practices: socio-technical imaginaries for the future of creative work. Digital Creativity, Industry and Culture conference, University of York, York. 20 Sep 2022.

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

This presentation analyses how the impacts of Artificial Intelligence technologies on creative work have been identified and constructed. The concept of imaginaries is used as a methodological and analytical approach to analyse a variety of grey literature sources published in the UK. Sources examined come from a range of organisations, including commercial companies, government departments, universities, and charitable foundations. The analysis highlights three interconnecting risk imaginaries in which creative occupations are differentiated from other occupations – safe, complemented, replaced. Specifically, this presentation will explore how creative occupations are constructed as being safe and/or are being complemented by automation, but are not being replaced. Whilst these creative work AI imaginaries constructed within grey literature offer empirically detailed visions and possibilities for the future of creative work, this article identifies two conceptual challenges to how the impact of AI on creative work is constructed. Firstly, the complement risk imaginary emphasising new possibilities for AI technologies and creative work is reconsidered by exploring the longstanding and everyday role of AI technologies in creative production. To do this the concept of assemblages is used. This analysis opens up the relationship between AI technologies and creative work to recognise not just the more spectacular visions of enhancing creativity but also repetition, boredom and the mundane. Secondly, the safe risk imaginary emphasising ideas of safe creative occupations is reconsidered by locating creative work in relation to wider experiences of employment and income generation. To do this the concept of portfolio work is used. This analysis opens up how occupational opportunities and challenges for creative workers are bound up with the ways in which AI technologies might impact on many different industrial sectors. This presentation will open up a critical discussion of the relationship between AI technologies and creative work, and suggest that the relationship can be partly understood as enhancing creative production and the opportunities for creative work, and partly understood in terms of ‘uncreative’ production and ‘non-creative’ work.

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