How will artificial intelligence reshape the way art is created, experienced and valued in London? The opening event in the Future London series brought together artists, technologists and cultural leaders to explore the opportunities, risks and responsibilities emerging in a rapidly changing creative landscape.
On Tuesday this week, artists, technologists, researchers and cultural leaders gathered in King’s Cross to explore a question that is beginning to reshape cities across the world.
What happens to a city’s creative life when new technology moves faster than the rules, institutions and business models designed to contain it?
That was the question at the heart of the first event in our new Future London series, delivered in partnership with the Knowledge Quarter. Bringing together artists, researchers, cultural leaders and audiences, the discussion asked whether artificial intelligence is opening up new possibilities for art and culture, or quietly eroding the conditions that make creative work possible in the first place.
For London, this is not an abstract debate. Culture is part of what gives the city its identity, its energy and its global pull. It shapes how people experience London, from the music they hear and the exhibitions they visit to the public spaces, venues and digital platforms that frame everyday life. As AI becomes more embedded in those systems, the question is no longer whether it will affect the creative industries, but how.
The discussion ranged widely, from immersive digital art and museum engagement to copyright, labour, inequality and the environmental cost of new technologies. But one theme ran through the evening: AI is not simply another tool. It is beginning to reshape the structures around creative work, including who gets paid, who gets recognised, who gets access and who gets left behind.
At one level, the conversation was hopeful. New technologies are already helping artists work at new scales, experiment with different forms of interaction and reach wider audiences. Dan Patton of Outernet London described how digital tools are enabling large-scale immersive cultural experiences and attracting audiences who may never have set foot in a gallery.
Léllé Demertzi, who works at the Alan Turing Institute but spoke in a personal capacity as an artist and curator, reflected on the potential of open-source models, digital commons and museum-based experimentation to widen access and create new ways for people to engage with collections, institutions and ideas.
That sense of possibility mattered. Several speakers were clear that artists have always adapted to new technologies, and that creative practice will continue to evolve. AI can support experimentation, expand participation and, in the right context, help cultural institutions reconnect with audiences whose habits have shifted dramatically in recent years.
But the mood in the room was far from uncritical.
“The central tension is not really between old art and new technology. It is between democratisation and exploitation.”
AI can lower barriers to entry. It can make powerful tools more widely available. It can help smaller organisations do more with less. Yet it is also being built and commercialised through systems that rely on scraped content, weak consent, opaque models and increasingly concentrated power.
Deborah Annetts, Chief Executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, set out the growing concern from creators across music and the wider arts: that generative AI is already undermining livelihoods by using creative work without permission or payment, while regulation struggles to keep pace.
With the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee having recently examined AI, copyright and the creative industries, and the Government expected to respond to a major consultation, the framework now emerging could have serious implications for creators, institutions and the wider economy. The question is not just how innovation is encouraged, but whose interests are protected when innovation accelerates.
What this means for London
This city depends on creative talent, cultural institutions and the public life that grows around them. If the balance tips too far towards extraction rather than support, London risks hollowing out one of the things that makes it distinctive. A city cannot sustain a thriving cultural ecosystem if artists, musicians, writers and makers are expected to keep producing value while the economic ground beneath them disappears.
Several speakers widened the lens further still. Mark Farid of Central Saint Martins pushed the debate beyond AI alone, arguing that these pressures sit within a longer story of declining arts funding, worsening inequality and a cultural economy that has become harder and harder to sustain.
Others raised concerns about digital monoculture, the global inequality built into current AI systems and the risk that a narrow set of commercial actors will shape the terms of cultural production for everyone else.
For The London Society, this was exactly the kind of conversation Future London is designed to hold.
We created this series with the Knowledge Quarter to help Londoners think through how technology is changing the city, not in theory but on the ground: in culture, sustainability, public life and the systems that shape everyday experience.
The opening event showed just how urgent that work is. It also demonstrated the value of bringing different perspectives into the same room: artists, institutions, technologists, campaigners and members of the public testing ideas together.
There was no neat consensus by the end of the evening, nor should there have been. But there was a clear shared understanding that the future of culture in London cannot be left to tech companies alone. It will be shaped by policy, public pressure, institutional choices and the extent to which we are prepared to defend creative work as something more than content.
The conversation continues at the next event in the Future London series, which turns to technology and sustainability and asks how innovation can support a greener, more resilient capital.
If this first discussion was any indication, the series will be at its best when it keeps connecting major technological change back to the everyday life of the city and the people who make London what it is.
Speakers:
Michael Harris — Head of Programming, Town Hall by Bottaccio (Chair)
Dan Patton — Director of Digital and Audiences, Outernet Global
Léllé Demertzi — Research Project Manager (BridgeAI) and AI & Arts Interest Group Organiser, Alan Turing Institute
Deborah Annetts — Chief Executive, Incorporated Society of Musicians
Mark Farid — Artist and Senior Lecturer, Central Saint Martins
