Trend AnalysisArts & DesignSystematic Review

The Creative Machine: How 57 Studies Map GenAI's Integration Across Creative Industries

A scoping review of 57 studies reveals how creative professionals across visual arts, writing, performing arts, and spatial design perceive and integrate generative AI toolsโ€”with adoption patterns that vary sharply by domain.

By Sean K.S. Shin
This blog summarizes research trends based on published paper abstracts. Specific numbers or findings may contain inaccuracies. For scholarly rigor, always consult the original papers cited in each post.

When a painter uses a generative AI tool to prototype compositions, is the resulting work less "creative" than one sketched by hand? When a novelist feeds plot outlines into a language model and sculpts the output into publishable prose, who is the author? These are not hypothetical questions. They are the lived reality of creative professionals across multiple industries, and the answers are not convergingโ€”they are fragmenting along domain lines that few predicted.

The Research Landscape

A scoping review published in AI and Ethics (2025) synthesizes 57 studies examining the perceptions and integration of generative AI across four creative domains: visual arts, writing, performing arts, and spatial design. The review's value lies not in any single finding but in its cartographic ambitionโ€”mapping how an entire ecosystem of creative practice is responding to a technology that can, for the first time, generate outputs that resemble the products of human creative effort.

The scope is deliberately broad. By spanning visual arts, writing, performing arts, and spatial design, the review captures something that narrower studies miss: the degree to which generative AI's reception depends on the specific creative domain. A tool that visual artists might view as a useful prototyping aid could be perceived very differently by performing artists whose work is rooted in embodied, real-time expression. The review examines both how creative professionals perceive these toolsโ€”their attitudes, anxieties, and expectationsโ€”and how they actually integrate them into practice.

What makes this review particularly useful for researchers and practitioners is its synthetic approach to a literature that is growing rapidly but remains fragmented. Individual studies tend to focus on a single domain or a single aspect of AI adoption. By assembling 57 studies across domains, the review offers a comparative lens: where are the commonalities in creative AI adoption, and where do the fault lines run?

Critical Analysis

The review's claims can be assessed against what the abstract and methodology make available:

<
ClaimEvidence BasisVerdict
GenAI is being studied across four distinct creative domains57 studies mapped to visual arts, writing, performing arts, spatial designโœ… Supported
Both perceptions and integration patterns are examinedReview scope includes attitudes and actual adoption practicesโœ… Supported
Adoption patterns vary across creative domainsThe multi-domain scope implies domain-specific findings, though specific differences require reading the full paperโš ๏ธ Plausible but details require full text
57 studies constitute a comprehensive mappingScoping review methodology is appropriate for breadth, though comprehensiveness depends on search strategy and inclusion criteriaโš ๏ธ Methodology-dependent

Several analytical considerations deserve attention. First, the choice of scoping review methodology (as opposed to systematic review with meta-analysis) is appropriate for a field where the research is heterogeneous in methods, populations, and outcomes. Scoping reviews excel at mapping terrain; they are less suited to producing definitive effect sizes or causal conclusions. Readers should approach the findings as a topographic survey rather than a definitive verdict.

Second, the four-domain structureโ€”visual arts, writing, performing arts, and spatial designโ€”raises questions about boundary cases. Where does game design fit? What about music composition, which straddles performing arts and computational creativity? The taxonomy is useful but necessarily imposes boundaries on a landscape that is, in practice, fluid.

Third, the temporal dimension matters. The 57 studies capture a snapshot of a rapidly evolving field. Perceptions of generative AI among creative professionals have likely shifted since many of these studies collected their data, particularly as tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and ChatGPT have moved from novelty to ubiquity. The review captures an important historical moment, but its shelf life may be limited.

Open Questions

  • Domain transfer: Do creative professionals who work across multiple domains (e.g., a novelist who also does visual design) adopt generative AI differently from domain specialists?
  • Quality vs. perception: The review maps perceptions and integration, but does it address whether AI-assisted creative outputs are qualitatively different from human-only outputs? This is the question audiences ultimately care about.
  • Economic displacement vs. augmentation: How do the 57 studies address the labor economics dimensionโ€”whether GenAI displaces creative workers or augments their capabilities?
  • Cultural variation: Are the 57 studies predominantly from Western, English-speaking contexts? Creative norms and AI attitudes may differ substantially across cultures.
  • Performing arts gap: Performing arts, with its emphasis on embodied presence and temporal unrepeatability, may be the domain where generative AI integration is most conceptually challenging. Does the review find fewer studies in this area, and if so, what does that absence reveal?

Closing

The most interesting finding may not be about AI at all. It may be about creativityโ€”how the arrival of a technology that can simulate creative output forces each creative domain to articulate, perhaps for the first time explicitly, what it values most about the human role in creative work. For researchers entering this space, the scoping review offers an efficient entry point into a fragmented literature. For practitioners, it offers a mirror: where does your domain stand in the adoption curve, and what assumptions about creativity are shaping your response?

Explore related work through ORAA ResearchBrain.

References (2)

[1] Scoping review of generative AI in creative industries. (2025). AI and Ethics.
Tsao, J., Liang, C. X., Nogues, C., & Wong, A. (2025). Perceptions and integration of generative artificial intelligence in creative practices and industries: a scoping review and conceptual model. AI & SOCIETY.

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