Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Generative AI and Creative Work: Narratives, Values, and Impacts

Baptiste Caramiaux, Kate Crawford, Q. Vera Liao, Gonzalo Ramos, Jenny Williams

TL;DR

The paper investigates how dominant online media narratives frame generative AI in the arts, revealing a techno-positivist bias that emphasizes automation and efficiency over traditional material craft. Using a manually curated corpus of 188 articles plus 19 product descriptions and inductive coding across 102 codes, it identifies five explicit values shaping the discourse: automation over manual work, efficiency over exploration, concept over execution, artefact over process, and short-term over long-term skills. It argues that these narratives, largely voiced by journalists and tech actors rather than artists, can influence policy, market dynamics, and artist livelihoods, sometimes reinforcing inequalities and marginalizing skilled labor. The study highlights the need for more inclusive, critical discourse that centers artists’ perspectives to avoid a one-sided, commodified vision of creativity where rapid prompts replace craftsmanship and long-form practice.

Abstract

Generative AI has gained a significant foothold in the creative and artistic sectors. In this context, the concept of creative work is influenced by discourses originating from technological stakeholders and mainstream media. The framing of narratives surrounding creativity and artistic production not only reflects a particular vision of culture but also actively contributes to shaping it. In this article, we review online media outlets and analyze the dominant narratives around AI's impact on creative work that they convey. We found that the discourse promotes creativity freed from its material realisation through human labor. The separation of the idea from its material conditions is achieved by automation, which is the driving force behind productive efficiency assessed as the reduction of time taken to produce. And the withdrawal of the skills typically required in the execution of the creative process is seen as a means for democratising creativity. This discourse tends to correspond to the dominant techno-positivist vision and to assert power over the creative economy and culture.

Generative AI and Creative Work: Narratives, Values, and Impacts

TL;DR

The paper investigates how dominant online media narratives frame generative AI in the arts, revealing a techno-positivist bias that emphasizes automation and efficiency over traditional material craft. Using a manually curated corpus of 188 articles plus 19 product descriptions and inductive coding across 102 codes, it identifies five explicit values shaping the discourse: automation over manual work, efficiency over exploration, concept over execution, artefact over process, and short-term over long-term skills. It argues that these narratives, largely voiced by journalists and tech actors rather than artists, can influence policy, market dynamics, and artist livelihoods, sometimes reinforcing inequalities and marginalizing skilled labor. The study highlights the need for more inclusive, critical discourse that centers artists’ perspectives to avoid a one-sided, commodified vision of creativity where rapid prompts replace craftsmanship and long-form practice.

Abstract

Generative AI has gained a significant foothold in the creative and artistic sectors. In this context, the concept of creative work is influenced by discourses originating from technological stakeholders and mainstream media. The framing of narratives surrounding creativity and artistic production not only reflects a particular vision of culture but also actively contributes to shaping it. In this article, we review online media outlets and analyze the dominant narratives around AI's impact on creative work that they convey. We found that the discourse promotes creativity freed from its material realisation through human labor. The separation of the idea from its material conditions is achieved by automation, which is the driving force behind productive efficiency assessed as the reduction of time taken to produce. And the withdrawal of the skills typically required in the execution of the creative process is seen as a means for democratising creativity. This discourse tends to correspond to the dominant techno-positivist vision and to assert power over the creative economy and culture.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 14 sections, 2 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. AI Narratives
  4. AI in the Arts
  5. Method
  6. Corpus creation
  7. Corpus filtering and analysis
  8. Findings
  9. Automation over manual work
  10. Efficiency over exploration
  11. Concept over execution
  12. Artefact over process
  13. Short-term over long-term skills
  14. Discussion

Figures (2)

  • Figure 1: Bar chart of the number of publications per month obtained from our queries over the period January 2020 to the present date. The colours indicate the number of sources: a darker colour means a larger number of sources, while a lighter colour means a smaller number of sources.
  • Figure 2: Summary of the findings. We identified five explicit values in the analysis (first column), from which we exhibit their implicit narratives (second column) and impacts (third column)