Artificial Intelligence in the Creative Industry: Partner or Competitor?

Key takeaways from the Creative Industry Cluster Miniconference

The CICC Miniconference, organized as part of DesignPécs within Budapest Design Week, explored one of today's most pressing questions: does AI help us as a creative partner, or does it stand against us as a competitor? And more importantly, what happens to our copyrights when we start working with machines?

AI is no longer future sci-fi – it's here, and it's transforming our work in the most diverse ways. As digital transformation unfolds across Europe, the Hungarian creative industry cannot remain a passive observer of this process. At the miniconference, professionals involved in the field shared their real-world experiences: how they use AI in their daily work, what legal and ethical dilemmas they face, and where they see opportunities at the intersection of creativity and technology.

Because one thing is certain: the future of the creative industry lies in adaptive resilience, community knowledge sharing, and collaboration.

Transformational Anxiety – AI Questions Across Europe

During the Erasmus+-funded CREMEL 2.0 project, we investigated the relationship between creative professionals and the rise of artificial intelligence through 64 in-depth interviews conducted across 6 European countries and 12 creative sectors. The results show a mixed picture: while some enthusiastically embrace the new opportunities, others approach the topic with serious reservations.

The biggest concerns include the threat to human creative values and skills, the tension between cultural preservation and technological innovation, and the possibility of human self-expression being pushed to the background. One interviewee framed the question this way: "How can critical human thinking be preserved with the spread of AI?"

When projecting AI effectiveness over five years, 80% of respondents (32 people) expect significant adoption, while only 5% believe AI's advances will remain low. This clearly indicates that the professionals are aware that we're facing a paradigm shift.

However, significant division exists between sectors. Digitally "native" sectors – such as design and digital arts, film production, video games, and advertising – adapt the new technology more naturally. In contrast, more traditional, human-centered sectors such as publishing, performing arts, and museums maintain reservations in defense of human values.

Peripheral Integration – The Strategy of Collaboration

One of the most important findings of the CREMEL 2.0 research: AI is a collaborative partner, not a replacement. This is the concept of "peripheral integration", which draws a clear line between what creative professionals use AI for and what they don't.

Accepted areas include administrative tasks, concept generation, and the preparation of technical solutions and suggestions – but importantly, these are not final solutions, but starting points that human creativity refines. In contrast, core creative processes, artistic self-expression, human authenticity, and the replacement of cultural values clearly belong among those areas where professionals maintain distance.

The survey on preferred levels of automation confirms this approach: the majority (38%, 18 people) prefer a medium level (3 on a 5-point scale) of automation, where human control and AI assistance are in balance. Only 1 person supports high-level (5/5) automation, which clearly shows that the professionals do not wish to hand over complete control to machines.

The generational gap also presents a significant challenge. Generation Z approaches new technologies with natural acceptance, rapid adaptation, and openness, while older generations often resist technological changes, worry about losing traditional skills, and adapt more slowly. This can lead to workforce tensions, knowledge transfer challenges, and "philosophical" disagreements within organizations – managing which is one of the biggest challenges for creative enterprises.

What Happens to Copyrights When We Use AI?

When we use an AI tool during a creative project, we rarely think about what happens to our copyrights. Yet this determines whether our work truly remains ours.

Copyright means two areas: moral rights (name connection to the work) and economic rights (authorization of copying and distribution). All of this comes automatically if the work has an individual, original character – meaning the creator made creative decisions that appear in the work.

However, copyright doesn't protect everything. An idea, principle, or fact in itself doesn't enjoy protection – only creative thoughts cast in individual, original form.

Can AI Be an Author?

The answer is clear: no. American courts have clarified this in several cases. In the famous Naruto v. Slater case, a macaque monkey grabbed photographer David Slater's camera while he was working in Indonesia and took some selfies. The photographer published the images, and then a legal dispute erupted: who is the author? The monkey, the photographer, or no one? The court ultimately determined that animals cannot be authors because they are not humans; thus, they cannot be persons in a legal sense either, so the images are considered public domain, without copyright protection.

This case carries a clear message: if a monkey cannot be an author, then a computer cannot either. AI tools – no matter how advanced – do not possess legal personality, cannot make conscious, creative decisions in a legal sense. Where there is no human involvement in creation, there is no copyright.

Who Is the Author When We Work with AI?

The answer depends on how human the process is. The basis of copyright is that free and creative human decisions appear in the work. As the Hungarian Copyright Expert Body phrased it: it's sufficient if the minimum of individual character manifests in the product, if there is at least minimal room for human choice.

The problem with AI creation lies precisely in this. If we delegate creative decisions to AI, and AI cannot be an author, then no copyright is created. It's as if a brush were painting itself – the tool alone cannot create. In this case, AI remains merely a technical aid, like a camera or word processor, but the crucial difference is that while a camera only records human decisions, AI is capable of deciding in our place.

However, there is a way out. If we add our own human creative work to AI-generated content – with post-production, refinement, composition, editing – then that part can be protected as a copyrighted work. The question is always subject to individual assessment: does what we, as humans, have added reach the minimum threshold of protection? To what extent do our own vision, taste, and creative decisions manifest in the work? Where this is demonstrable, copyright protection is well-founded.

The Question of Prompting

It's worth comparing the situation to photography. What makes a photograph a copyrighted work? According to the Hungarian copyright commentary, individual, original character can appear in the thoughtfulness of subject selection, the uniqueness of the moment captured by the photographer, the chosen setting and viewpoint, or in technical solutions used creatively for composition.

Now imagine the same thing with AI. If we specify in a detailed prompt that we want a personal and intimate portrait of a young woman sitting on a wooden bench in a sunny park, with a Sony camera, 85mm lens, and dreamy lighting – then who made these creative decisions? Us, or Midjourney?

The answer is not clear, and international practice is also divided. The U.S. Copyright Office in the Allan case determined that although the creator experimented through approximately six hundred prompts to reach the final image, the decision stated that in response to the prompt, the machine performs the traditional creative steps – meaning the brushstrokes, color selection, and fine-tuning of composition are all the machine's "work" – therefore there is no copyright. The office argues that the prompt is only an instruction, but the actual implementation is the algorithm's job.

In contrast, a Beijing court in a similar case, where the creator refined through approximately one hundred and fifty prompts, judged the situation differently. The court saw that with a complex, multi-step prompt containing detailed execution decisions, human creation is expressed, the prompt itself is a creative activity that carries sufficient intellectual investment and individual character to create copyright.

The question, therefore, is: is prompting itself creation? Perhaps the most important realization is that what we don't decide, AI decides for us – and these decisions made in our place don't belong to us legally.

Practical Advice

If we work with AI and want copyright protection:

• Maximize our human creative decisions – don't just say "make a logo," but specify the style, color palette, mood, and we choose the final elements

• Document the work: how many iterations, what decisions – keep the prompt history and intermediate versions to prove our creative process

• Don't delegate all decisions to AI – wherever we can, we should decide: about composition, colors, proportions, the final output

• Perform significant human post-production – edit the generated image in Photoshop, rewrite the AI text in our own voice, and combine multiple elements

• Be transparent: mark AI usage – this is not only ethical but also provides legal security if a dispute later arises about the work's origin

Conclusion

There is currently no unified European or Hungarian practice on exactly where the boundary lies in copyright protection for AI-created works. What is certain: the more creative, human decisions involved in the process, the greater the chance of copyright protection.

One of the most important lessons of the CREMEL 2.0 research is that the future of the creative industry lies not in rejecting or unconditionally accepting AI, but in peripheral integration – treating technology as a partner while preserving the core of human creativity. AI can help with administration, concept generation, and technical solutions, but the final creative decisions, artistic self-expression, and cultural values remain human.

But most importantly, regulation is still forming. The AI Act has taken steps toward sustainable integration, but practical legal guidance specific to the creative industry is still missing. This means that those who create with AI now are also shaping the terrain of future regulation – with every decision, every lawsuit, every debate. It's not just about learning to use the technology, but also about being part of that historical moment when law and creativity strive to keep pace with innovation.

The question is not whether to use AI, but how we use it – responsibly, consciously, and while maintaining human control.