This collection brings together researchers from across media studies, music studies, the visual arts, film and TV, animation, sociology, history, literature, philosophy and aesthetic theory, to interrogate the growing role of AI in the creative industries, its potential (both negative and positive), and how we are to react to the rise of AI as both tool and creator. Artificial Intelligence has advanced extremely rapidly over the past years. Responses have been polarized; with some predicting the end of the world and others celebrating a technology with the potential to create a new industrial revolution. The biggest difference between these new algorithmic technologies and those that preceded them are the potential for new AI models to generate creative content. Visual art, photography, literature and digital scripting have been produced by AI, to varying levels of success. To the existing debates around AI (questions of ethics, consciousness, or cyborg theory, for example) have arisen new problems regarding the role of art and the artist in the age, not of mechanical reproduction, but mechanical production. Can a robot be creative?

Joseph Darlington is Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Animation with Illustration at Futureworks, Manchester. He is the author of The Experimentalists (2021) and Christine Brooke-Rose and Post-War Literature (Palgrave, 2021), as well as a number of other books, novels, and journal articles. He is co-editor of the Manchester Review of Books.