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

1–6 Harry Potter. Mr Bean. Adele. Peppa Pig. Downton Abbey. Vivienne Westwood.

7 British creative muscle doesn’t just project the soft power of our culture and people on a global stage; it contributes roughly £150 billion to the UK economy every year.

8 That’s around 6 per cent of the total.

9 Our creative industries don’t just give us influence; they provide employment too.

1 But these are turbulent times for culture workers.

2 Change is in the air – an icy wind of technological disruption is picking away at the certainties of the past.

3 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.

4 Industries have traditionally been built on rarity—of talent, of tools or resources, of access or agency—on the assumption that demand should always exceed supply.

5 Remove the scarcity and the business model begins to quiver – as, unsurprisingly, do the people that model supports.

6 By threatening that essential scarcity, generative AI threatens not just jobs but the logic that justified those jobs in the first place.

7 This is more than the camera replacing the painter – it is something stranger: the apprentice replacing the guild.

1 But we’ve seen this film before.

2 In the city states of Renaissance Italy, a similar destabilisation occurred.

3 The emergence of new technologies, new materials, financial innovation and shifting patronage structures eroded the monopoly of traditional craftsmen.

4 In the seething, independent workshops of Florence and Siena, knowledge leaked and techniques spread.

5 The mystique of the solitary genius began to dissolve into something more collaborative, more systematised and, to many at the time, more threatening.

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

1 Generative AI is doing something eerily similar.

2 It is taking activities once protected by professional gatekeeping and making them accessible to anyone with a prompt box and a vague idea.

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

4 The instinctive reaction is to panic: if everyone can create, surely creativity itself becomes worthless.

5 But Florence suggests the opposite.

1 When more people can make things, the value does not disappear – it migrates.

2 It shifts from execution to judgement, from skill to taste, from making to deciding what is worth making.

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

1 That seems to be the current situation, according to research across UK creative agencies.

2 The 2026 Spark Report found that, in more than half of agencies studied, AI usage is happening with no formal governance.

3 Staff are innovating alone, carrying their agency’s legal and IP exposure.

1 This “governance gap” is where we might usefully consider the example set in Florence 600 years ago.

2 Guilds enforced standards, while patrons funded risk but also curated output.

3 Constraints were not the enemy of creativity; they were its scaffolding.

4 Generative AI is giving us Florence-level access without Florence-level structure.

5 The technology has democratised the workshop, but we have yet to rebuild the guild.

6 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.