Original title: Drawing boundaries: How creative practitioners navigate precarity in AI-embedded creative work
Jie Huang (19448503), Graham Hitchen, Safak Dogan · October 2026
When generative AIArtificial intelligence systems trained to produce new content such as text, images, or audio from user prompts. enters the arts, workers face unstable jobs. Researchers interviewed twenty-one people in UK film, gaming, and live theatre to see how they cope. The workers do not simply accept AI tools. Instead, they actively decide which tasks stay human and which go to computers to protect their status as creators. These lines depend on software limits, project needs, and the legal environment.
Two cooks are sharing a busy restaurant kitchen to prepare a dinner service. If they do not explicitly agree on who chops, who seasons, and who tastes, they step on each other's toes and lose pride in the final plate. Here, artistic workers must draw similar dividing lines with automation software. They constantly mark which duties remain strictly theirs so they do not lose their sense of ownership over the finished piece.
Creative workers in film, gaming, and live performance face job insecurity as generative AI spreads. Rather than simply boosting speed, using these tools forces professionals to defend what makes their work distinctly human. Understanding how workers draw these lines helps industries redesign workflows to protect human control without rejecting helpful technology.
The findings rely on twenty-one interviews solely within the United Kingdom, limited to film, gaming, and live performance. The abstract does not test specific workflow designs, measure productivity changes, or evaluate how long these negotiated boundaries hold as technology advances.
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Drawing boundaries: How creative practitioners navigate precarity in AI-embedded creative work — Jie Huang (19448503), Graham Hitchen, Safak Dogan — Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies — doi:10.1177/13548565261494818
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.