I don’t fear AI – I fear what happens when everyone can create

Harry Potter. Mr Bean. Adele. Peppa Pig. Downton Abbey. Vivienne Westwood.

British creative muscle doesn’t just project the soft power of our culture and people on a global stage; it contributes roughly £150bn to the UK economy every year. That’s around 6 per cent of the total. Our creative industries don’t just give us influence; they provide employment too.

But these are turbulent times for culture workers. Change is in the air – an icy wind of technological disruption is picking away at the certainties of the past. While nobody ever imagined a job in the arts was a secure ticket, we always assumed there must be some value in the long, painful acquisition of creative skills and experience – if not their security, then at least their rarity.

Industries have traditionally been built on rarity: of talent, of tools or resources, of access or agency. Demand should always exceed supply. Remove the scarcity and the business model begins to quiver – as, unsurprisingly, do the people that model supports.

Generative AI threatens that essential scarcity. And it doesn’t just threaten jobs; it threatens the logic that justified those jobs in the first place. This is more than the camera replacing the painter – it is something stranger: the apprentice replacing the guild.

But we’ve seen this film before.

In the city states of Renaissance Italy, a similar destabilisation occurred. The emergence of new technologies, new materials, financial innovation and shifting patronage structures eroded the monopoly of traditional craftsmen.

In the seething, independent workshops of Florence and Siena, knowledge leaked. Techniques spread. The mystique of the solitary genius began to dissolve into something more collaborative, more systematised and, to many at the time, more threatening.

After all, if an apprentice can replicate your style, what do you have left to sell?

Generative AI is doing something eerily similar. It is taking activities once protected by professional gatekeeping and making them accessible to anyone with a prompt box and a vague idea.

Like the Florentine workshop, it enables imitation before mastery, production before originality and participation before permission.

The instinctive reaction is to panic: if everyone can create, surely creativity itself becomes worthless. But Florence suggests the opposite.

When more people can make things, the value does not disappear – it migrates. It shifts from execution to judgement, from skill to taste, from making to deciding what is worth making.

The real risk is not that creativity is democratised, but that it is left unmanaged – allowed to sprawl into a swamp of unmediated noise.

That seems to be the current situation, according to research across UK creative agencies. The 2026 Spark Report, published by AI transformation consultancy Spark AI, found that, in more than half of agencies studied, AI usage is happening with no formal governance – no whitelisted tools, no data-handling training, no policy. Staff are innovating alone, carrying their agency’s legal and IP exposure.

Meanwhile, generative AI is being used in creative ideation and production by 47 per cent of the studios in the study, up from 27 per cent just six months ago.

This “governance gap” is where we might usefully consider the example set in Florence 600 years ago. Because the Renaissance was not a free-for-all – it was a controlled burn. Guilds enforced standards. Patrons such as the Medici family funded risk but also curated output. Constraints were not the enemy of creativity; they were its scaffolding.

Generative AI is giving us Florence-level access without Florence-level structure. The technology has democratised the workshop, but we have yet to rebuild the guild.

And until we do, we should expect exactly what Florence avoided: not the death of creativity, but an overwhelming surplus of it – with no obvious way to tell what will endure.