Generative AI is rapidly transforming creative practices as well as long-standing assumptions about authorship, ownership, and the value of creative work.

The impact of this transformation is broad and rapid, covering entirely new forms of creativity alongside ethical, legal, and moral dilemmas spanning intellectual property, consent, the attribution of creative agency, and the economic futures of the creative industries. Whilst these issues have always been contested, the rapid adoption of Generative AI has illuminated them publicly on an unprecedented scale that demands new ways of looking, thinking, governing, and accounting for the relationship between AI and creativity.

Beyond studying creativity, the Creativity theme champions creative approaches to research. Creative methods such as practice-based arts research and Research through Design are structurally suited to responding to the socio-technical challenges associated with AI and data science. Such methods embrace emergence and uncertainty, collapse the gaps between intervention and evaluation, and can produce actionable insights from amid the seismic shifts associated with rapid technology adoption, while those shifts are still taking place. This positions creative research approaches as a uniquely valuable component of transdisciplinary Data Science and AI research.

At its heart, this theme is about surfacing hidden assumptions, promoting novelty, and crossing disciplinary boundaries. It brings these qualities to bear on the profound impact that the rapid adoption of AI and the widespread impact of Data Science are having on the uniquely human traits of creativity and culture.