The process and method behind digital production is outrunning the language available to us to communicate the human ingenuity and creativity central to meaningful and sustainable artistic pursuits.

Whereas previous art departments might produce singular, contemplative imagery and mise-en-scène to illuminate a setting and communicate tone, most artisans in production houses these days are generating large volumes of consecutive or strongly related images and frames, capable of accurate representation and authentic rendering as the camera shifts within digitally-mediated narrative worlds. Responsible use of AI in this setting exists as a tool to support feats of deeply collaborative and human-centred modes of creative output.

Public discourse about AI replacing human creativity occludes the value of human artistry and assumes that AI systems can perform creative tasks in any meaningful sense.

Such discourse threatens the viability of the creative and cultural industries by affecting audience engagement as well as the future workforce participation of creatives whose skills are fundamental to the industry’s future. When audiences suspect there to be little or no human effort or labour or ideas behind the stories they’d otherwise be emotionally and financially invested in, those stories and the artistic medium through which those stories are told, lose value. It also makes people think twice about the potential for creatively rewarding careers, denuding the industries of the future artisans needed for their survival.

The backlash against creative computation operates within current mainstream discourse that conflate all AI technologies with ‘AI slop’, devaluing and denying any artistry that lies behind different models of Responsible AI innovation. Such discourse forecloses much needed discussions about how authenticity and integrity is formulated today and how style and aesthetics are being shaped in today’s media landscape. This is preventing the creative industries from having honest conversations with themselves and their audiences and risks devaluing the future of cultural life.

The research fellow will work with Framestore, its artists and their practice as context and case study to investigate:

1. What does ‘artistry’ mean in today’s digital production context?
2. What conceptual and historical resources (for example, art historical, aesthetics, philosophical, design) can supply a vocabulary for understanding how ‘artistry’ manifests within today’s film and screen studios?
3. How can this vocabulary be developed and communicated to the public in the interests of protecting the agency, legitimacy and value of creative professionals working with Responsible AI innovations in the creative industries.

Glossary

Responsible AI in the context of this challenge and in addition to the working definition contained in our main guidance note, Responsible AI is about the intentional and deliberate use of AI as a tool to support rather than substitute for human creativity and judgement. Responsible AI in creative contexts assists human flourishing and protects the agency and value of human artistry.

Bridging Responsible AI Divides 

BRAID is a six-year programme funded by UKRI’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and delivered in partnership with the Ada Lovelace Institute and the BBC. The programme is dedicated to bringing arts and humanities knowledge more fully into the Responsible AI ecosystem, supporting research and innovation fellowships, scoping projects, demonstrators, and translational research. We work to widen access to Responsible AI knowledge and practice in the UK and to demonstrate its value in concrete, real-world contexts.  

Framestore

Framestore brings together world-class producers, artists, and technologists to craft visually striking work across advertising, episodic, and immersive productions. Our teams blend creative ingenuity with cutting-edge technology to deliver high-end visual effects, immersive storytelling, and premium content for global clients, brands, and broadcasters. 

This research fellowship will be hosted at Framestore’s state-of-the-art London studio that brings together artists, producers and technologists working across film, episodic, advertising and immersive entertainment.  

We welcome proposals from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including creative practice-based research, and historical and philosophical approaches. The collaboration is not intended to suit primarily ethnographic approaches or situated methods that locate Framestore as an object of study. Rather both Framestore and the fellow are meant to collaborate and explore concepts and ideas together. The challenge is meant to leverage Arts and Humanities perspectives to tell narratives that illuminate and communicate research findings. Proposals are encouraged to include creative outputs that aim to increase public understanding and advance public discourse. This might include an evolving, blog-style format of communication (e.g. a Substack) developed collaboratively as the project unfolds.

The challenge would best fit fellows that:

• have genuine fluency with or a willingness to engage in-depth with computational processes of artistic production;
• are capable of co-designing a project plan with practitioners at Framestore from the outset, rather than present a finished methodology, to build trust and enable more meaningful engagement and research; and
• sustain that collaborative way of working and engaging throughout the project.

See UKRI Guidance on Co-production in Research for more information.

Framestore will onboard the fellow, work to finalise the project plan, and provide access to resources and people including creative and technical practitioners at its London studio on Chancery Lane. The studio will help shape and deliver the project by assigning a key point-of-contact to work on the project at a minimum of 10% time commitment (which can be shared across the organisation from time to time according to project need). It is expected that senior creative and technical leadership, including studio founders, the chief technology officer and other relevant staff, will be involved in shaping and delivering the project, in addition to the named point of contact. It is anticipated that the mode and intensity of the collaboration will evolve over the course of the fellowship, with an initial period of onboarding and alignment likely to precede more public-facing and exploratory activity.

The fellowship is expected to produce academic and conceptual or creative outputs to support understanding artistry in contemporary digital production, developed with and grounded in Framestore’s practice, alongside public-facing outputs that communicate this thinking to a wider audience (e.g. a blog-style format).

Foreground IP created during this fellowship will vest with the fellow’s research organisation in the usual way. Background IP relating to Framestore’s own tools, pipelines, techniques and unreleased client work remains Framestore’s confidential information throughout and after the fellowship. Framestore will guide how this information is to be described or referenced in the fellow’s outputs to ensure the necessarily level of confidentiality is retained.

The fellow will need to sign a non-disclosure agreement to reflect the sensitivity of unreleased client and commercial work encountered during the fellowship. The precise scope of the NDA and any implications for what and when the fellow can research and publish on will be confirmed prior to contracting. This in part reflects live, directly relevant work underway at Framestore that includes new authenticity-focused services for brands and ongoing discussions with UK heritage institutions about representing their assets in generative contexts, which may also offer valuable material for the fellowship.