AI – another creative tool or harmful to artists?

AI is changing the way we make, experience and understand creative work. It can open doors, make ambitious projects possible. But what does that mean for artists? Is AI simply another tool or is it changing the creative process itself?

In our recent webinar, Make it or fake it: Artists on AI, creativity and what’s at stake, artists and creative technologists Alan Warburton, Shehani Fernando, An-Ting and Ian Gallagher explored the opportunities, challenges and ethical questions emerging as AI becomes part of creative practice.

The conversation was wide-ranging, many acknowledging the uncertainty surrounding the technology, with headlines about job displacement and the absence of protections for artists’ voices and likenesses. Some artists are retreating from the technology wholeheartedly, but some are using it to experiment, question and provoke, making things that weren’t previously possible. Their work is asking us to think critically about the systems and technologies shaping our lives.

Artist, animator and video essayist Alan Warburton has worked with synthetic images for around 20 years. His short film Image Empire explores the relationship between computer graphics, computer vision and the technologies behind today’s synthetic media.

Describing himself as someone who has been working with “the tech that everyone loves to hate”, Alan deliberately launched the film on LinkedIn – a platform where people developing AI and those whose work is being disrupted by it sit alongside each other.

The film itself is entirely human-made, using visual storytelling to explore the technology rather than relying on it.

For Alan, artists have an important role to play in helping us understand technological change – not necessarily by providing answers, but by asking better questions.

“Journalists, artists and researchers with an interest in digital media have a responsibility to understand AI and there’s good and bad ways of experimenting with it.”

For immersive producer and director Shehani Fernando, the question of what AI might mean for us personally was at the heart of Vocalize, created with Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund.

The immersive experience invited visitors at Hay Festival to train as voice actors with Stephen Fry. There was a twist: after completing a series of exercises, visitors heard their own cloned voices being used to endorse a series of deliberately dubious products.

The experience was playful, but also unsettling. As Shehani explained, the aim was to get people beyond an abstract debate about AI and allow them to experience what voice cloning might actually feel like.

Around 1,000 people took part, many leaving messages and wanting to discuss what they had experienced.

Shehani described the project as an attempt to use the arts to “move the needle in how we think about this” rather than reducing the conversation to a simple for-or-against debate.

An-Ting and Ian Gallagher, the creative duo behind Lost Communications, are exploring communication between humans and the natural world.

Their current project, Underwater, combines live music, immersive technology, an online game and underwater recordings to explore the sounds of marine life. Audiences can enter the virtual world as fish, while a live performance combines music with a submarine travelling through an underwater environment.

AI has been used throughout the development process – from researching spatial audio and designing equipment to generating 3D coral and helping develop code.

For Ian, the technology isn’t simply about doing existing work more quickly. It has made it possible to attempt things that previously felt out of reach.

“There are things that we made for this project that I just would never have tried to make in the first place,” he explained, because they would previously have taken months to develop.

For An-Ting, AI has also opened up technical knowledge. As a musician rather than a coder, she has used AI to help her understand programming and create tools to support her creative practice.

The discussion also explored an important tension: AI can democratise access to knowledge and technology, but much of the infrastructure is controlled by large companies.

An-Ting and Ian encouraged artists to look beyond the biggest commercial AI platforms and explore open-source tools, research papers and communities. They described how freely available code and research can give small creative teams access to sophisticated technologies.

But greater access doesn’t remove the need to understand what sits behind the tools.

For artists, that means thinking about where models come from, what data they have been trained on, what happens to material uploaded to them and what choices are being made on the artist’s behalf.

The speakers repeatedly returned to the importance of creative judgement.

AI can generate ideas, images, code and possibilities, but it doesn’t know what an artist is trying to say or why they want to say it.

An-Ting put it simply: “What is your thing which can touch me?”

That question points towards something central to the conversation. AI may change the labour involved in making art, but the human experience, intention and judgement behind creative work remain important.

The same applies to audiences. In Vocalize, the team thought carefully about what information they actually needed from participants. They decided against collecting unnecessary personal information simply to make the experience more shocking.

Transparency matters too. Audiences should understand what is being captured, how it will be used and what choices they have.

The closing message from the artists wasn’t to embrace AI unquestioningly or reject it outright. Instead, they encouraged artists to experiment, understand the systems they are using and develop their own ethical frameworks.

Shehani encouraged people to audit the digital tools they use, look at their terms and conditions and think carefully before uploading valuable creative work.

Alan urged artists, journalists and researchers to understand the technology rather than treating it as something happening somewhere else.

And Harmeet Chagger, The Space’s Head of Innovation, summed up the spirit of the session: “Stay curious and critical.”

For artists, that may be the most useful starting point of all. AI is changing quickly, and there are still plenty of unanswered questions about creativity, ownership, consent and power.

Artists don’t have to have all the answers. But they can experiment, question the technology and help all of us imagine what comes next.