Creativity after AI: Rethinking 'Creativity' in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Citation

MacRury I (2025) Creativity after AI: Rethinking 'Creativity' in the Fourth Industrial Revolution [Creativity after AI?]. The Second International Conference on Cross-Cultural Communication(2025), The Second International Conference on Cross-Cultural Communication(2025) Xinxiang city, Henan province China., 09.05.2025-10.05.2025.

Abstract
The recent advent and mainstreaming of artificial intelligence technologies (in the form of large language models, LLMs, text-to-image models and generative AI)  challenges long-held assumptions about the nature of professional creativity,  - notably as identified and deployed under the auspices of creative industries, and raising  questions about how we define, recognise, value  and evaluate creative processes in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.   This paper interrogates the shifting boundary between human and machine-led creativity, exploring a conventional dichotomy between algorithmic and heuristic processes to consider how AI transforms not only the means of creative production but also some core conceptions of what means to “create”  The paper reframes some classic typologies/ definitions of professional creative production in the context of generative AI and acknowledges the Euro-centric components in some creative industries’ working definitions of creative practice. While AI systems operate within algorithmic constraints, their capacity for generating novel outputs through large-scale pattern recognition complicates traditional understandings of originality, intuition, and artistic agency. This paper draws on an array of theories from psychoanalysis to social psychology and organisational analysis to examine AI-driven creativity represents an extension of human heuristics or a fundamental shift in the epistemology of invention.  

• Creatovity adter AI Xinxiang 2025