Examining Advanced Technologies in the Creative Industries: Metadata and Documentation, 2024-2025

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The influence of advanced technologies on work continues to expand rapidly across global industries, generating widespread policy debates. This research aimed to examine how advanced technologies are influencing work in the UK creative industries. How technologies such as artificial intelligence and generative AI are shaping the work experiences of individuals working in the creative industries has been underexplored. This knowledge gap is important to address because the creative industries are a major source of employment and make a significant contribution to GDP. The creative industries also generate significant social and cultural impact by contributing to community cohesion, public health and social inclusion. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews with individuals working in the creative industries and stakeholder representatives. The data highlighted a wide range of views, perspectives and experiences relating to the adoption of advanced technologies in the creative industries. The potential advantages of incorporating advanced technologies into work practices were discussed by participants. These advantages included for example, the time-savings technologies may yield, how advanced technologies can improve accessibility and the job creation possibilities in tech-orientated roles. However, the participants stressed the key challenges individuals working in the creative industries face because of advanced technologies. These included for example, the threat of job losses across creative industry sub-sectors and the implications for intellectual property and privacy. Importantly, the participants highlighted how understanding the impact of advanced technologies on the creative industries requires careful consideration of the complex socio-economic and political context in which the creative industries operate. The participants discussed the impact and implications of COVID and economic conditions on individuals working in the creative industries, along with other challenges relating to diversity and inclusion, skill shortages and contract work.

The research project was conducted by the researcher, Dr Emma Hughes, as part of the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre's research programme. The Digital Futures at Work Research Centre (Dig.IT) will establish itself as an essential resource for those wanting to understand how new digital technologies are profoundly reshaping the world of work. Digitalisation is a topical feature of contemporary debate. For evangelists, technology offers new opportunities for those seeking work and increased flexibility and autonomy for those in work. More pessimistic visions, in contrast, see a future where jobs are either destroyed by robots or degraded through increasingly precarious contracts and computerised monitoring. Take Uber as an example: the company claims it is creating opportunities for self-employed entrepreneurs; while workers' groups increasingly challenge such claims through legal means to improve their rights at work. While such positive and pessimistic scenarios abound of an increasingly fragmented, digitalised and flexible transformation of work across the globe, theoretical understanding of contemporary developments remains underdeveloped and systematic empirical analyses are lacking. We know, for example, that employers and governments are struggling to cope with and understand the pace and consequences of digital change, while individuals face new uncertainties over how to become and stay 'connected' in turbulent labour markets. Yet, we have no real understanding of what it means to be a 'connected worker' in an increasing 'connected' economy. Drawing resources from different academic fields of study, Dig.IT will provide an empirically innovative and international broad body of knowledge that will offer authoritative insights into the impact of digitalisation on the future of work. The Dig.IT centre will be jointly led by the Universities of Sussex and Leeds, supported by leading experts from Aberdeen, Cambridge, Manchester and Monash Universities. Its core research programme will cover four broad-ranging research themes. Theme one will set the conceptual and quantitative base for the centre's activities. Theme two involves a large-scale survey of Employers' Digital Practices at Work. Theme three involves qualitative research on employers' and employees' experiences of digitalisation at work across 4 sectors (Creative industries, Business Services, Consumer Services, Public Services). Theme 4 examines how the disconnected attempt to reconnect, through Public Employment Services, the growth of new types of self-employment, platform work and workers' responses to building new forms of voice and representation in an international context. Specific projects include: 1. The Impact of Digitalisation on Work and Employment -Conceptualising digital futures, historically, regionally and internationally -Comparative regulation of digital employment - Mapping regional and international trends of digital technology and work 2. Employers' Digital Practices at Work Survey 3. Employers' and employees' experiences of digital work across sectors -Changing management processes and practices -Workers' experiences of digital transformation 4. Reconnecting the disconnected: new channels of voice and representation - displaced workers, job search and the public employment service - self-employment, interest representation and voice Dig.IT will establish a Data Observatory on digital futures at work to promote our findings through an interactive website, report on a series of methodological seminars and new experimental methods and deliver extensive outreach activities. It will act as a one-platform library of resources at the forefront of research on digital work and will establish itself as a focal point for decision-makers across the policy spectrum, connecting with industrial strategy, employment and welfare policy. It will also manage an Innovation Fund designed to fund novel research ideas, from across the academic community as they emerge over the life course of the centre.