Entrepreneurship & Innovation Research/Scholarship Seminar– Professor Jonathan Sapsed and his PhD student Dan Foster-Smith (Culture Lab)
Title: From Freaking Out to Collaboration: The Adoption and Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Creativity in Design Agencies
Date: 09 December 2024
Time: 14:30 – 15:30
Venue: NUBS.2.13
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:
Speaker: Prof Jonathan Sapsed and his PhD student Dan Foster-Smith (Culture Lab)
Abstract:
This paper discovers a process of adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) among creative professionals, through two ethnographic studies of graphic design agencies. Through observation and testing of a bespoke tool developed for the first study, we find that human creatives follow a phased “story arc” beginning with “Freaking Out”, mistrust and aversion to potentially human-substituting technology, followed by Partaking in the tools, tentatively realising some of AI’s creative potential, to Utilising, where creatives explore the range of creative search and AI’s capacities for surprising ideas, and finally Collaborating, where humans realise the limitations of AI and their own status and power in making final decisions of what to take to clients and markets. The second study, following the mass diffusion of AI tools, confirms how the technology augments the reach of the typical Divergence phase of the creative process, and to a degree soothes the Convergence phase of filtering and selection by providing objective data. This mitigates the typical conflicts and cross-specialisation of all-human creative teams. The research resonates with some recent theory on trust, agency, and creative co-ordination but emphasises the degree to which human agency is enhanced by AI in creative work, rather than “conjoined” or “hybrid” metaphors.