The cloak of creativity: AI imaginaries and creative labour in media production

We critique the ways ‘creativity’ is harnessed by artificial intelligence companies, technologists, cultural producers, and even academics to justify a sense of urgency around the adoption of artificial intelligence tools in creative work. The creative industries have seen the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence-powered video generation tools such as Sora and Runway, accompanied by a broad communication and publicity campaign that emphasises artificial intelligence as a co-creative tool that enables human practitioners to ‘boost’ or ‘enhance’ their productivity. These discourses not only position and frame creativity as a uniquely human, cognitive trait that can now be extended, expanded, or even fully automated by artificial intelligence, but they also conjure imaginaries of artificial intelligence models as entities capable of simultaneously generating ‘original creative output’ while also acting as servile ‘assistants’ taking on rote tasks. Underlying these imaginaries is a model of creativity as a cognitive faculty is possessed by humans or replicated by machine algorithms; yet, this imagination dehumanises actual humans. Reflecting on our study of European film practitioners using artificial intelligence tools in their creative workflows, we argue that the dominant narrative of creativity as a faculty serves merely to cloak the material, networked, and relational nature of creativity. From this approach, the issue of labour is paramount to the conceptualisation of ‘creativity’ in the algorithmic age and we argue for a de-cloaking and re-materialisation of human creative labour. ‘Creativity’ is neither human nor machinic, but rather a networked and distributed form of agency.