Creative industries: Challenges and opportunities of digital technologies

GAI and Machine Learning (ML) offer the potential to generate substitutes for human-created content in all creative industries and may upend existing practices, current knowledge, and potential employment for creatives. Although we know quite a bit about how new technologies shape industries and work generally, creative industries have been immune because creativity is the one thing that technology traditionally has not been able to replace. For instance, prior technological disruptions still relied on humans to create content but engaged digital production to reduce costs and digital distribution to generate new rents, whether from streaming or television rights (Jones, 2001; Jones, Lorenzon & Sapsed, 2015). The dynamics of GAI are being paralleled by new types of digital creative products, such as blockchain-based Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in visual arts, which are transforming what a creative product is in the art world. Similarly, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and the emergence of the metaverse offer new contexts in which creative endeavors can be deployed (see, for example, Chalmers, Fisch, Matthews, Quinn, & Recker, 2022).