Expert Eyes, Machine Hands: Creativity, Aesthetics, and Accountability in GenAI
Loading...
Files
Size: 700.04 KB, File format: Adobe PDF
Size: 12.07 MB, File format: Microsoft Word 2007+
Size: 9.96 MB, File format: Adobe PDF
Date
Authors
Nairn, Angelique
Matthews, Justin
Asuncion, Angela
Fastnedge, Daniel
Guinibert, Matthew
Narayan, AD
Supervisor
Item type
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Queensland University of Technology
Abstract
[Introduction] Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has become one of the defining cultural technologies of the 2020s, transforming not only how content is produced but also how creativity itself is imagined. From text generation to image synthesis, GenAI blurs distinctions between professional and amateur practice, art and automation, originality and imitation. These shifts reach far beyond the studio or agency: they unsettle cultural hierarchies, redistribute expertise, and reconfigure what it means to author or evaluate creative work with scholars and practitioners highlighting both GenAI’s disruptive and enabling potential (Amankwah-Amoah et al.; Coffin; Hartmann et al.; Matthews et al.). As such, GenAI sits squarely at the intersection of technology and culture, making it vital to examine how creative practitioners experience and negotiate its affordances. These questions mirror broader cultural discussions about automation, expertise, aesthetics, and creativity in digital media, situating our research within contemporary debates about creativity in an algorithmic age.
This article explores those negotiations through a collaborative autoethnography (Chang) in which creative professionals who are also educators worked with GenAI tools to develop an advertising campaign from concept to final artefact. By grounding our analysis in lived experience, we examine not only what GenAI can produce, but how it alters the creative process. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity and Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital, we situate our reflections within a wider theoretical conversation about expertise, taste, and technological mediation. These frameworks allow us to interrogate how GenAI participation affects the balance between human judgment and machine generation or between creative flow and algorithmic patterning. In doing so, we contribute to broader debates on the cultural implications of GenAI by identifying how expert practitioners sustain, redefine, and sometimes resist aesthetic standards in an era of algorithmic co-creation.
Description
Keywords
4602 Artificial intelligence, 470204 Cultural and creative industries, 1902 Film, Television and Digital Media, 2001 Communication and Media Studies, 2002 Cultural Studies, 3605 Screen and digital media, 4701 Communication and media studies, 4702 Cultural studies
Source
M/C Journal, ISSN: 1441-2616 (Print); 1441-2616 (Online), Queensland University of Technology, 29(4). doi: 10.5204/mcj.3216
DOI
Publisher's version
Rights statement
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Copyright (c) 2026 Angelique Nairn, Justin Matthews, Angela Asuncion, Daniel Fastnedge, Matthew Guinibert, AD Narayan
Copyright (c) 2026 Angelique Nairn, Justin Matthews, Angela Asuncion, Daniel Fastnedge, Matthew Guinibert, AD Narayan
Permanent link
Endorsement
Review
Supplemented By
Referenced By
Creative Commons license
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International