A Frame for This Project: Understanding a New Creative Reality
Big systemic changes are hard to track, especially when they’re moving fast and impacting everything at once. Doubly difficult when the existing systems you might defend have long been imperfect and are themselves collapsing.
That’s the situation facing artists and creative communities as AI promises to remake the foundations of creative life.
On the one hand, the possibilities of AI — as new tools, as new media, as new exploration or extension of human creativity — are intoxicating. The ability to assign technical or mechanical tasks to machines that can orchestrate or render or iterate might be simply the continuation of a long line of tools artists have been refining for centuries. In significant ways, the history of art across disciplines has been shaped by new technologies.
Better horn valves, the printing press, the camera, computer graphics — each has extended the reach of artists and challenged the imagination, opening up new art forms and definitions of art in the process. AI could result in the further democratization of creativity. Liberate the act of imagination from the sometimes years-long investments in technical study required to execute on that creativity, and you might elevate the expression of human imagination in ways not yet contemplated. Instant translation across cultures and mediums, new languages of creative expression, and new genres of interactive personalized experiences might change our notions of what art can do and the roles it might play.
On the other hand, handing over the craft of art might lead to the withering of the human creative muscle. The learning of craft has been foundational to how artists develop their voices, acquire their skills, and deepen their ideas. Turning over the “process” of art to machines might disrupt the very nature of becoming an artist.
On a more practical plane, AI promises to disrupt the structures that support creative production and the marketplaces that shape creative life. The inequities in the creative economy, the “starving artist” tropes, the production models that have yoked artists to corporations created to mine their creativity — these models might have been necessary in the past in order to get work to market. But could a fairer, more equitable system be implemented using AI that broadens the ability of more artists to make a living?
And our artistic institutions, squeezed by inflation for resources on the production side and hampered in their ability to bring art to wider audiences — could their ability to nurture and make great art, support artists and serve growing audiences be supercharged by the potential resources AI might unlock?
So it’s complicated.
The instinct is to track how AI is changing creative culture issue by issue: a copyright case here, a labor dispute there, a content moderation problem somewhere else. But that approach misses the architecture of what is actually transforming. The copyright case and the labor dispute and the content flood are connected, all pieces of a structural reordering.
This project tries to take a different approach. Instead of organizing by issue or jurisdiction — categories that shift with every court ruling and legislative session — we have organized the issues by function, by the role each system plays in how creative work gets made, attributed, valued, exchanged and protected. It’s an attempt to see the connections that issue-by-issue tracking obscures, and to impose a framework that holds its shape even as developments keep piling up.
CRAIONS, the Creativity & AI Observatory, is a project to track how artificial intelligence is impacting the legal, economic, institutional and systemic structures that determine the conditions for creative work and its marketplaces. The project tracks developments in litigation, legislation, regulation, labor agreements, commercial deals, platform policies and technical standards, and advocacy and research across the United States and across the world. Creative fields include music, visual art, film, video, television, publishing, journalism, performance, games and other creative fields.
The Observatory consists of a database and map of individual developments. Each entry consists of a specific event or instrument, including lawsuits and court ruling, bills and statutes, regulatory decisions, licensing agreements, collective bargaining provisions, platform standards, or published research studies. Each entry describes the development, links to its sources, and cross-links to other developments in the tracker. Entries are updated as new developments occur, and each is checked against primary sources.
What is unique to this project is its use of a three-system framework to track developments. The three systems are built on a common premise: AI tools can separate and reconstitute elements of creative identity, value and ecology in ways that challenge existing systems and marketplaces. Tracking developments in AI issue-by-issue is problematic, however, since systemic change means that multiple elements in the system are in motion at the same time.
The three systems are:
- Attribution and Accountability: This layer deals with identifying authorship components and who is responsible for them.
- Value and Exchange deals with how creative elements are assembled into units that can be licensed and paid for.
- Cultural Infrastructure and Ecology deals with the conditions that produce creative work in the first place. The framework calls these the trust layer, the exchange layer and the ecology layer.
Most developments touch more than one frame, so entries are assigned to those systems that apply. A court ruling might decide a question of authorship, determine damages, and affect employment in a field, for example.