Artificial Intelligence will fundamentally change the structures of how the creative economy works. How should we understand this disruption and more intentionally plan for how the new systems will function?
The USRAO Creativity + AI Observatory, Network & Synthesis (CRAIONS) Mapping Project is a policy observatory and research initiative by the US RAOs to track how artificial intelligence is reshaping creative work and industries.
It organizes issues and developments in AI policy across an analytical framework of three interconnected systems — attribution, value exchange, and cultural infrastructure. The observatory currently tracks 464 developments across litigation, legislation, regulation, labor agreements, commercial deals, research, and international frameworks. The project has also commissioned three artistic projects that speak to the issues tracked here.
AI is structural change, not simply a technology tool or trend. The three-system framework is a through-line intended to help understand how artificial intelligence is impacting policy across the entire creative ecosystem.
Big systemic changes are hard to track, especially when they’re moving fast and impacting everything at once.
Who gets recognized, trusted, or held responsible for creative acts? Copyright debates argue about authorship. Six other attribution functions — provenance, likeness, essence, disclosure, training data, audience — are quietly collapsing too. The full picture of how creative ownership is being redefined.
How is creative labor, data, and attention valued and compensated? Major labels have stopped suing AI companies and started licensing to them. Training-data markets pay while creative markets collapse. Who’s getting locked out of both, and why.
How do tools and norms reshape how culture is produced and sustained? AI is being built on humanity's shared creative inheritance while a 1960s-era arts ecosystem collapses on its own terms. Can what we build next, as AI scrambles long-held norms, beat what's already broken?
— Synthesis Posts
— Creative Work as Inquiry
We commissioned three artists who have something to say about how AI is changing creative life — whether through aesthetics, politics, performance, craft, embodiment, data culture, memory, folklore, or entirely new forms. This is not work that “illustrates the future.” It's work that helps us think about how the future is being made. Project reports will be posted mid-August.
