Of all the panels at the Rhodes Forum on Technology & Society 2026, the panel interrogating how creative work is valued in the age of AI was the most visually striking. On wide screens, vibrant behind the stellar panellists, a montage of clips unfurled.
In the first set, Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung paints a canvas, the very human delicateness of her hands contrasted by the stodgy, clinical appearance of her mechanoid co-creator. The clips, excerpted from Chung’s work “MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_2)”, formed one node of the conversation in the room. The second node came from the accompanying video clips: the intricate, completely handmade process behind designer Anil Padia’s fashion house, Yoshita 1967. Together, they made differing submissions to what the idea of being "Human by Design" could look like.
The panel itself featured Chung and Padia, along with Simon Cook, CEO of LIONS, the global organisation behind Cannes LIONS, WARC, Effie and Contagious, and Anna Ganley, Chief Executive of the Society of Authors, the UK’s largest trade union for writers, illustrators and literary translators. Moderated by BBC Radio 1 broadcaster Tina Daheley, the hour-long session threw light on the complicated negotiations artists must make as we reimagine the value and possibilities of creative work in face of LLMs and increasing automation.
“The risk of AI is not that it reduces creativity by any means, but that it has the potential to render originality as economically irrational,” posited Cook, giving words to the most key of worries artists face in an already fickle, and often bleak economy. Though worries of this kind surfaced, both in the panel and the Q&A that followed, the room stayed away from binary distinctions of tech = evil, human-made = good. Chung’s work, focusing on the in-betweenness of things and how emerging technologies could be an aid to human intent, provided an excellent counterbalance to the possibility of reductive takes.
“Before we had cinema, we had photography, but they didn't cancel each other out. It became a new medium... we can potentially be at the birthing moment of these new types of mediums,” Chung offered. Acknowledging the shifting zeitgeist, Cook noted how sameness in creations and ideas was exacerbated by the use of AI as a replication factory, not a tool or new medium, while consumers and audiences are shifting towards placing a premium on humaneness. His own data complicated the picture. AI disclosure among Cannes LIONS entries rose from roughly 11% to 40% in three years, and a jury that once obsessed over whether AI had been used no longer cared, however work signalling ‘human-made’ continued to rise to the top.
“Will there be a premium attached to human-made? I think absolutely. It's not a new debate. It's the reason people pay more money for a tailored suit,” said Cook. In Padia’s own work, the impossibility of automation adds to what Chung would go on to describe, after Walter Benjamin, as the “aura” of the handmade. “When they hold a garment, they can feel that there's something being made by humans,” Padia explained. The longer timespan taken, from ideation to construction, is already classed as a luxury. Padia was candid that this places his work in the luxury sector, beyond the reach of most people, with some pieces taking about a month and a half to make. But for creative works of a different sort, such as creative writing, the same logic has yet to come into play. In fact, with frontier labs scraping tomes and tomes of work, often with no regard for their creator’s consent, authors’ own works are severely devalued.
Ganley brought this concern to the fray, and reiterated that how creators’ work is licensed to AI must always “be a meaningful decision by creators.” She described the loss of sales as an “existential effect”, impacting the ability of creators “to earn a living, to pay their bills, to feed their families.”
To be seen, to be acknowledged, and not turned into AI slop is the least that one can ask for. Chung clarified that it wasn’t about an oversimplified distinction between man-made and synthetic work, adding that her North Star is “intention”. This intention, of course, must exist within systems that protect the artist and their ownership. Later, Chung added that it wasn’t just about payment. “Human dignity at the table resonates with people in a deeper way than payment. Because everyone remembers being an unpaid intern, and those were very joyous times, because you felt like people were investing in your own development.”
Perhaps that is what creative work that is Human by Design, as this year’s forum highlighted, would look like: one that centres dignity. Instead of falling along lines of what might be construed as good or bad, just through its origins, there would be a greater emphasis on what the piece seeks to evoke, and what the process of getting to the output entailed, rather than just simplifying it all to a dollar sign.