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Paper short abstract

The article examines how generative AI reshapes creative work by shifting professional boundaries from execution to interpretation and evaluation. Drawing on interviews with creative professionals, it analyzes the affective dynamics of AI collaboration across art worlds and creative industries.

Paper long abstract

This article examines how generative AI reshapes creative practice by shifting professional boundaries from execution toward more interpretative, evaluative, and contextual forms of work. It argues that this transformation is not merely procedural but embodied and affective. The shift from making to prompting, steering, and assessing introduces new affective dynamics, including exhaustion from endless iterative refinement, mistrust toward generated outputs, moments of surprise that reignite curiosity, and the ambivalence of sharing responsibility with an algorithmic collaborator. Emotions are therefore treated not as secondary reactions but as analytical entry points into how expertise and professional identity are recalibrated under AI-driven conditions.

To explore these questions, the article draws on qualitative interviews with creative professionals. It situates these developments within the distinction between artworld contexts and the creative industries (Celis Bueno and Pereira, 2026) and asks how shifts in professional boundary work acquire different meanings and affective resonances across institutional settings structured by divergent logics. In relatively autonomous art worlds, where experimentation often takes precedence over execution and economic accountability, working with generative AI may shape professional identity differently than in the creative industries. Generative AI’s distributed agency may also resonate with long-standing critiques of singular authorship in the art world and evoke curiosity or fascination toward algorithmic co-creation. In creative industries, however, where craftsmanship is closely linked to professional identity and authorship functions as a legal and economic mechanism for securing property rights and profitability, similar changes may instead intensify emotions such as anxiety about professional value and recognition.