Research Themes

Temporality is how an artist's relationship with AI changes over time. It develops over months and years, through curiosity, frustration, small discoveries, and sometimes a decision to step back. This theme follows that arc across music, visual art, design, film, and performance: how the working relationship starts, changes, and settles, and how artists come to see their own practice differently as it does. It also holds what develops slowly rather than in one session, an artist's judgement about what to keep, and the way they return to earlier work and see it afresh.

The Collaboration theme is about where an artist working with AI places it, in their work and in their own mind. Do they treat it as a tool, an assistant, or a partner? Every artist answers differently. In the work, it is about what they hand to AI and what they keep as their own core creative act. In their mind, it is about how they understand and describe the relationship, and what the interaction means to them. Where an artist places AI on both levels shows how they see their own role and identity.

Creative skill lives in the body: the hands of a painter who has drawn ten thousand lines, the ear of a musician trained over decades, the instinct a dancer builds through years of physical practice. This theme asks what happens to that hard-won bodily knowledge when AI can produce, in seconds, work that once took a trained hand to make. The body is where the work comes from, and AI competes with it and tries to replace it. But AI has no body and no intention of its own; it only does its algorithmic work. The body knows far more than AI can, and that is why several artists get frustrated working with it.

Artists in every field want to be surprised by AI in a way they can use. A tool that simply gives an artist what they ask for is more boring than one that occasionally gives them something they did not expect. We call that productive uncertainty. This theme looks at how artists pursue that useful surprise, how they tell a good accident from noise, how they reflect on what AI suggests and judge it against their own taste, and whether they then generate again for more or shut it down. AI's speed can spark the surprise and also rush the slower thinking the work depends on.

When an artist works with AI, it is not obvious who created the work, and the question is legal, ethical, and personal at once. This theme follows how artists protect the part that is theirs and draw a line between their own intention and what AI generated. AI produces, but the intention, the meaning, and the sense of an audience come from the artist. That is why authorship, meaning, and emotional intent belong together here.

Ethics is what we should govern in AI so that creative practice stays fair for everyone. A few companies own the infrastructure, and their choices are baked in: what AI trains on, whose work it treats as normal, who profits from it. The models carry those biases, and no clear rules credit an artist's work. Artists need a say in how models are trained, and payment when their work feeds a system. This theme asks what we should govern, and what no one governs yet.

Sustainability is whether creative practice can last as AI keeps automating creative work. If AI keeps flooding the world with fast-produced output, it eats into the pool of original work, and unique art gets crowded out. That is the worst case, and it worries artists now. This theme discusses how creative practice may survive over the long term as AI enters it, and how AI slowly depletes artists' livelihoods, the worth of their skills, and their motivation to create. Ethics asks what we should govern to protect creative practice. Sustainability is what happens to it when we do not.

This theme is about designing future creative AI systems that respect how artists actually work. The artists in this study use AI tools, dissect them, and build systems that serve their own purposes. Their experience should guide the design. The requirements point to two things: first, a memory of an artist's taste, past work, and the direction they have been heading; second, a balance between surprise and control that shifts with the nature of the work.