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AMD Special Research Forum - Creative Industries: Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Technologies 

Editors: Candace Jones (Univ of Edinburgh), Noah Askin (UC Irvine), Frederic Godart (INSEAD), Sarah Harvey (UCL) and Damon Phillips (U Penn-Wharton)

Overview

In 2023, the Hollywood writers (Writers Guild) and actors (SAG-AFTRA) unions engaged in strikes against major global film and television producers. These strikes had far-reaching repercussions, affecting individual creatives who lost employment and income, studios that saw drops in revenue and share prices, and the U.S. state of California-a prominent hub of creation and production-which lost $5 billion during the first few months of the strike period (Koblin, Sperling & Barnes, 2023). At the core of these union disputes lies the thorny question of whether Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) will be used to displace creative workers. The union movement echoes calls, notably in the European Union, to regulate AI and address some of its major challenges, particularly those concerning Intellectual Property (IP) rights (Satariano, 2023). Questions about the need for regulation and IP protection in creative industries extend well beyond film and television. Authors are discovering that their books are being used to train large language models (LLMs) like those that power ChatGPT, and which are, in turn, increasingly capable of writing their own books based on those original inputs (Reisner, 2023). Musicians' voices are being "deepfaked" and put in songs and collaborations that the musicians themselves never actually wrote or performed (Donahue, 2023). Artists' work is being used to build algorithms that generate images, drawings, and other visual output (Chen, 2023).

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).

These dynamics are ricocheting across creative industries and raising critical challenges, such as:

1. How do emerging technologies like GAI potentially redefine who and what is creative, and will they reshape the experience of creative work and the identity of creative workers?
2. How emerging technologies alter roles, relations, and structures in creative production and what are the implications for the value chain? How will technological change affect existing organizational forms and organizational identities, or potentially create new organizational forms or organizational identities?
3. How do new technologies align with or violate existing copyright law, which underpin economic and business models for defining who has monetary rights from a creative product? What new business models will arise to capitalize on these technologies?
4. How does the increase in content creation and distribution via digital means influence cities as sites of creative production, which arose to offer co-location and agglomeration benefits?
5. What social movements are emerging from these digital disruptions and what is their impact on the dynamics of creative industries? How do social movements mobilize emerging digital technologies in creative industries to achieve their goals?

Current research has limited existing theory and knowledge that aids creatives, creative organizations, cities, and governments in addressing these challenges. Moreover, these challenges offer fruitful avenues for empirically exploring the dynamics of creative industries to generate new theories and frameworks to advance knowledge and practice. We call for submissions to explore these dynamics in creative industries and take full advantage of the mission of the Academy of Management Discoveries (AMD): to publish and promote exploratory research of management and organizational phenomena that are not adequately explained by existing theories or understood by existing research.

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Candace Jones
Full Professor
University of Edinburgh Business School
Edinburgh
+44(0)131 6513858
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