Moral Judgment and Generative AI in the Creative Industries

Edgar, Sian Joel, Pan, Yu-Chun and Helliwell, Alice C (2025) Moral Judgment and Generative AI in the Creative Industries. In: The UK Academy for Information Systems Conference 2025, 23-24 April 2025, Newcastle University Business School. (Submitted)

Abstract

This paper combines literature analysis and focus group discussion to explore the role of moral judgments in generative AI use within the creative industries, focusing on whether professionals perceive it as morally acceptable. Utilising literature to inform our focus group questions, we sought to understand how creatives use generative AI, if at all, the ethical barriers to adoption, the perceptions of the generative AI creative output and the broader implications of generative AI use. In our focus group, we found there was a range of generative AI use cases, and how it was used had a bearing on whether it was deemed morally acceptable. Ethical barriers ranged from individual moral objections (e.g. a sense of copying others’ work), collective moral objections (negative impact on creative education and industry as a whole), and broader ethical concerns about energy usage. The qualitative analysis and literature review have helped to form a theoretical framework which we aim to empirically test.

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