AI as a Creative Service (AICS): – Unleash the Artist in you!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to become a disruptive self-service technology for artists. New AI-enabled services can now generate unique creative content that is indistinguishable from that produced by humans. Such content may consist of visual material such as photographs, illustrations, audio, or text. As an example, predictive image generating systems such as DALL-E 2 can create a great variety of high-quality images based on prompts entered by a human (Hyung-Kwon et al. 2022). Similarly, GPT-3-based technology can generate unique texts based on input prompts, making it easy to produce large amounts of writing for various purposes such as social media, blog posts, entertainment, or news items (Dale 2021). Various AI enabled self-services include text generation and editing services (Sudowrite, Copy.ai, Jasper.ai), art creation services (Wombo, Nightcafe), and music composition services (Aiva.ai). There are ongoing efforts to create even convincing video material based on user prompts. Hence, AI has gradually evolved from an automation tool to artists’ artificial assistant in many industries. The progression is likely to be disruptive, similar as in any field where advancements in technology have forced professionals to recalibrate their focus, reskill, or migrate to other areas. Service research professionals need to rethink how creative content is co-created and monetized in the future, incorporating both human and non-human contributions. From a theoretical point of view this requires new conceptualization of who is the owner of artwork as AI can be engaged in varying roles during the art creation, evaluation, and monetization process, as well as art education. In the future, humans and intelligent machines are likely to operate more jointly as hybrid teams (Schoonderwoerd et al. 2022). However, service theories do not yet capture the multitude of varying roles AI and robots could play in the process. This conceptual paper contributes to service literature by developing a framework for AI enabled or robot facilitated art in all industries where text, sound and visual cues are used for creating immersive service experiences. We present a model that shows how creative professionals’ (or anyone interested in instant creation of art with AI enabled self-services), can operate on many different levels of automation and co-creation. On the low interaction end, AI can be used to generate ideas, concepts, or structures to start the artwork with. It can also modify some earlier works to find new paths to explore manually. On the other extreme, AI can do all the work. In the middle, where the most interesting avenues lie, creative professional work with AI-enabled self-services in iterative steps as a dynamic team throughout the entire creative process.