AI vs The Arts: Creative Expression, the Job Market, and Our Own Complicity
What happens when we use AI in the arts? Is art truly ‘art’ if it’s AI-generated? These are the questions that are rocking creative organisations everywhere.
In Arts Council England’s Literature Overview for 2026, they highlight the lack of a ‘standardised agreement’ when it comes to the use of AI and its acceptability, which is only one half of the problem. Not only is the absence of a cohesive policy causing rifts within the literature sector, but it is also posing a risk to the general public, with the potential for ‘increasingly homogenised content’ and a ‘market saturat[ed] with non-human authored material.’ But what does this mean and why should we care?
As I sat in my English lecture this week, learning about Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, my lecturer spoke about Eliot’s concerns over growing technology, and how the cinema overstimulated the human mind, including the surge in low-brow entertainment that Modernism wanted to assert itself above. I couldn’t help but compare it to AI: the risk of homogenised content, the disintegration of artistic expression. There will always be artists, but will there always be a place for them in the face of AI? The development of the feature film leading to the domination of visual culture could be seen as a precursor to our current crisis, only this time all human-produced art is at risk.
It raises a lot of questions, with no straightforward answers, not yet anyway. The rapid growth of AI seems to defy possibility, and it will likely continue to grow in this way into the next decade. While its use in administrative work is inevitable, where do we draw the line when it comes to the arts? Is writing web copy okay? Or a social media post, if you’re not a graphic designer yourself? And with every use of AI for something that could, and likely should, be done by a human, are we not signing away that job to AI more and more until eventually it’s not an option for future graduates? I’m specifically thinking about communications, copywriting, and translation here, but it can be applied to many other disciplines.
This is something I’ve come face to face with. As Chair of a literature-focused youth board, we have drafted our own AI policy and have had difficult conversations about when AI is acceptable. For us, that is never, unless it’s being used as an accessibility tool. It’s hard, especially in a sector that is extremely time-poor. You don’t realise how much administration goes behind arts programming until you're ten emails deep and there’s no end in sight. It’s easy to turn to AI. Write this web copy for me. Answer this email. So I can actually get on with my creative work. And maybe as a lone freelancer that’s okay, but in an organisation, that’s two or three jobs instantly lost to AI. And the young people that turn to AI for these things are losing vital employability skills for later on.
Because as it stands, you can’t use AI if you’re a copywriter. Again though, I must say not yet, and I suppose that’s the point I’m trying to make. Our complicity is accelerating this transition. We are training AI with every use, and while there is resistance, what with the recent petitions against Turnitin seen from universities across the country, including St Andrews, there is also resignation, a reliance on Google AI overview, and a tendency to ask for AI summaries on secondary reading.
I suppose the point of this article is, next time you turn to AI, consider if you really need it. Could you do it yourself or, by using AI to caption your society’s Instagram post, are you closing the door to a future job opportunity? In the context of the current job market, that’s a pretty scary thought. While I’ve focused specifically on the arts here, this is an issue we all need to draw attention to. Every use of AI has future consequences, even if it makes the present that tiny bit easier. This is our technological revolution; now we must decide how to respond.
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