Abstract/Summary

The UK creative industries contribute over £124 billion to the UK economy annually and account for more than 5.7% of the total UK Gross Value Added (GVA).1 Yet, there are feelings of uncertainty regarding what impact generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney and Suno are going to have on the creative industries. Undoubtedly, generative AI is revolutionising media production, changing the parameters of what constitutes creativity, authorship and ownership in unprecedented ways. Now more than ever, users of generative AI can produce stories, scripts, images, music and even entire films simply by prompting widely available, often free-to-use AI models that have been trained on large datasets through machine learning processes. While the capabilities of generative AI tools to perform these tasks to a human-level quality are, in some instances, still limited, they nonetheless bring with them a series of moral, ethical and legal challenges that need to be addressed as a matter of urgency. At present, there currently exists little in the way of guidance, regulation and recommendations for best practice regarding how to integrate generative AI, specifically, into UK media production in a responsible and ethical way. Hence, this research emerges as a timely intervention into the creative industries by assessing the limitations and opportunities of using generative AI in media creation.