Art (ificial) Intelligence

“Are the robots coming for your creative career?” Alarmist, apocalyptical questions about AI are popping up everywhere. The creative sector is ready to get underneath the rhetoric of fear to ensure the answer is “no.” 

But, what’s more, the arts and culture community is poised to lead PEI’s conversations about AI engagement, ethics, and effects.

Creative workers should be given primacy as the thinkers for all of society on how to respond to AI’s threats and its promise. What artists do best is notice and respond to the world around us and make meaning of it—in ways that can only filter through the human imagination.

If the colonizing, world-shattering billionaire interests behind AI try to take out arts and culture careers first, it is because they know a) that we know history that tells us no outcome is foregone or inevitable and b) that artists take on new technologies with creativity, irreverence, and sly subversion. 

Creative workers create visions and tell transformative stories about all possible worlds, including worlds that flourish outside the control of Big Tech. 

Earlier this spring, a National Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Culture took place in Banff, Alberta to bring together artists with tech leaders, researchers, and decision-makers to discuss how AI is already changing the cultural landscape and how Canada needs to respond.

Canada’s Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller said government wants to “ensure that Canada leads the global conversation on responsible AI development, and that innovation and cultural sovereignty advance together,” and federal Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon said, “As we build the AI economy, I’m excited to see our creators help shape the future.” 

The conversation about culture and AI must not be siloed in or from the cultural sector. In the AI discussions already happening in PEI, there is both scope and nuance, diversity and specificity, that all other sectors need to hear. Some artists embrace artificial intelligence; others reject it. However, most responses I’m encountering, both from creatives promoting early adoption and those promoting active resistance, have in common pragmatism, skepticism, and readiness to examine AI’s effects in a wider framework of policy, ethics,  and environmental and human rights. 

In the arts and culture sector, we understand what distinguishes creation from production. (Thanks to artist Jane Affleck for that insight.) We are experts in copyright and intellectual property—and how to protect these. We are experts on the gig-based economy, the worth of the intangible and the ephemeral, the weight of embodying ideas, and the importance of freed expression. Creatives know that when we pay the value of undervalued work, such as art work and care work, people and communities flourish.

At a recent meeting of an advisory group for Culture Works Canada, the national human-resources sector leader for culture, Grégoire Gagnon shared a message he presented to international experts: “The cultural sector IS society’s research and development (R&D) department.” This has never been more true, and the cultural sector has much to offer the societal challenges of AI.

I asked the robots, “Should the arts and culture sector be the leading sector to consider the ethics and effects of AI in PEI?” The robots were hesitant: “Arts and culture shouldn’t lead alone—but they are uniquely positioned to lead the conversation,” said ChatGPT. Hmm. 

There is still time for a conversation led by creative workers and based in human ingenuity that gets us less insipid, equivocal answers to important societal questions. We need to ask for art intelligence, not the artificial kind.

CreativePEI is a sector catalyst and connector that empowers PEI’s arts, culture, and creative professionals. Jane Ledwell has been the Executive Director since November 2025. creativepei.ca