Restructuring Intelligence: Crafting Ethical AI for the Creative Industries
In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence (AI), a pressing concern emerges as AI begins to reshape culture, creativity, and expression in the creative industries. Ve Dewey, a globally networked design leader, emphasizes that this challenge is not merely technological, but a systemic design issue that involves interconnected infrastructures deeply influencing society and coexistence.
The creative sector, a significant economic and cultural force, is at risk of altering who gets to create, erasing voices, and structuring future cultural expression. Dewey underscores the urgency of this issue, stating that it requires a fundamental rethink of AI infrastructure to safeguard imagination, creative agency, and originality.
Principles for responsible AI in this context include protecting cultural diversity, reconceptualizing AI governance, and emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration and design thinking. Cultural diversity, as affirmed by UNESCO’s 2005 Convention, ties cultural expression to creativity, free expression, imagination, and dialogue. Reconceptualizing AI governance aims to avoid centralization of AI power, supporting a more equitable distribution of AI’s impacts and fostering creative agency among diverse creators. Interdisciplinary collaboration and design thinking recognize AI's role in reshaping meaning and human coexistence, building, sharing, and governing AI systems inclusively.
Dewey aligns with scholars like Yoshua Bengio in calling for a fundamental rethink of AI infrastructure to support democratic and pluralistic cultural creation, rather than allowing AI to consolidate power and erase marginalized voices. Creativity is a process, not a product, and responsible AI must safeguard the conditions that enable cultural expression.
Today's AI empires rely on opacity and automation without consent, potentially reproducing extractive colonial logics in our cultural systems. The lack of structural governance to protect imagination, creative agency, and originality is a major challenge. However, initiatives like the AHRC's BRAID programme offer a model of sustainability-led policy, addressing AI's environmental impact through governance tools.
The creative industries in the UK employ 2.4 million people and contribute £124 billion to the UK economy in 2023. As a key growth sector in the Government's Industrial Strategy, the stakes are high. The international context adds urgency, with the U.S. signing an Executive Order targeting so-called "woke AI", effectively removing equity, diversity, and inclusion from federally supported AI development. This could have profound implications for AI use in the UK and Europe.
Recent events, such as WeTransfer's update of its terms of service in summer 2025, which permitted user content for AI training, causing a backlash and exposing the importance of transparency in AI use, further highlight the need for responsible AI practices.
In conclusion, responsible AI in the creative industries necessitates a structural redesign of AI systems guided by principles of democratic access, cultural diversity, creative agency, and systemic governance. This approach aims to shape a future where many can participate meaningfully in cultural creation.
- The challenge in the AI-driven reshaping of culture, creativity, and expression in the creative industries is not solely technological, but a systemic design issue deeply influencing society and coexistence.
- Principles for responsible AI include protecting cultural diversity, reconceptualizing AI governance, and emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration and design thinking.
- AI infrastructure needs to be rethought fundamentally to safeguard imagination, creative agency, and originality, as suggested by scholars like Yoshua Bengio.
- Today's AI empires, relying on opacity and automation without consent, potentially recreate extractive colonial logics in our cultural systems.
- A sustainability-led policy, such as the AHRC's BRAID programme, offers a model for addressing AI's environmental impact through governance tools.
- The creative industries, with 2.4 million employees contributing £124 billion to the UK economy in 2023, are a significant growthmore sector in the Government's Industrial Strategy.
- Recent events, like WeTransfer's update of its terms of service in summer 2025, demonstrate the importance of transparency in AI use, emphasizing the need for responsible AI practices.
