Generative AI and creative practices: four critical keywords between the artworld and the creative industries

This essay reflects on divergences and overlaps across two approaches — the industrial and the artistic — in current debates about generative AI and creative practices. We articulate some key differences between the two through the semantic variances in four keywords: technology, creativity, skill, and authorship. These keywords continue to be essential vocabulary in present interdisciplinary investigations into the impact of generative AI on creativity and creative work. In the artistic field, characterised by the notion of “the artworld”, creative practices hold relative autonomy from economic considerations. From the industrial perspective, the “creative industries” occupy a position between the artworld and the economic world — that is, creative practices are simultaneously subject to artistic considerations and the market logic of cultural production. We argue that by foregrounding the specificities in how the two approaches differ and by tracing shifts in the meanings of particular words used in the communication and critique of the uses and effects of generative AI on the production of creative media, we move towards a more nuanced perspective that is sensitive to disciplinary, institutional, and conceptual disparities.