Reflecting on cultural labour in the time of AI

With generative AI disrupting human monopoly of creativity, there is an urgent need to freshly rearticulate cultural labour as a marker of human creativity. I suggest we critically revisit the existing perspectives of cultural labour in cultural policy discussion (unproductive, creative and precario...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMedia, culture & society Vol. 46; no. 6; pp. 1312 - 1323
Main Author Lee, Hye-Kyung
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.09.2024
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Artificial intelligence
Creativity
Cultural policy
Humans
Labor
Monopolies
Occupational roles
Uncertainty
cultural work
copyright
creative precarity
generative AI
meta creativity
precarity
cultural labour
AI creativity
creative labour
cultural policy
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Summary:With generative AI disrupting human monopoly of creativity, there is an urgent need to freshly rearticulate cultural labour as a marker of human creativity. I suggest we critically revisit the existing perspectives of cultural labour in cultural policy discussion (unproductive, creative and precarious labour) to reflect on their limitations and implications for our understanding of AI’s challenges. Based on this, I argue that we should expand the discussion of precarious labour to elaborate the emerging ‘creative precarity’. In particular, I will explore its key dimensions – the increasing uncertainty in terms of cultural workers’ creative roles, rights and identity, and audience responses – and their policy implications. At the core of potential policy response to and our research into creative precarity, there are fundamental questions of how we redefine cultural work in the time of AI, what new meanings we can attach to cultural labour, what constitutes the human-ness in human creativity and why it crucially matters.
ISSN:0163-4437
1460-3675
DOI:10.1177/01634437241254320