Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Creative Work: Rethinking Authorship, Originality, and Human Creativity in the Creative Industries
Abstract
Generative artificial intelligence has moved rapidly from a specialist computational technology to an everyday creative infrastructure capable of producing text, images, music, video, design concepts, and other cultural outputs. Its diffusion across the creative industries has intensified long-standing questions about what creativity is, who may legitimately claim authorship, how originality should be evaluated, and which forms of human skill retain value when machines can generate plausible creative material at scale. This conceptual article critically synthesizes scholarship from creativity research, computational creativity, human–computer interaction, labour studies, intellectual property, design, and cultural production. It argues that generative AI should neither be understood simply as an autonomous creator nor reduced to a neutral instrument. Instead, contemporary creative production is increasingly hybrid: human intention, cultural experience, prompts, models, training data, platform architectures, iterative selection, and post-generation editing interact in producing outputs. Evidence suggests that generative AI can improve productivity, support ideation, lower technical barriers, and raise the assessed quality of some individual outputs, while also creating risks of homogenization, deskilling, weak attribution, labour displacement, and the extraction of value from prior creative work. The article therefore proposes a human-centred model of hybrid creativity in which authorship is linked to meaningful creative control, originality is assessed through situated transformation rather than mere novelty, and the future value of creative labour rests increasingly on judgment, direction, interpretation, contextual knowledge, and accountable human agency.
Keywords: generative artificial intelligence, creative industries, authorship, originality, human creativity, creative labour, hybrid creativity
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