The value of ‘creative capital’ in the age of AI

The conversation around AI and ethics is often reduced to black-and-white viewpoints. It’s right or it’s wrong. It steals or it innovates. Either use unlicensed data to comprehensively train AI models, or don’t, and risk output mediocrity.

Two things can be true, and this binary thinking misses the foundational issue.

We are not just navigating new technical and legal landscapes, we are negotiating the future of creative work.

As someone embedded in intellectual property law, brand innovation, and licensing, I’ve spent my career navigating the intersection of creativity, ownership, and commerce.

I’ve been passionate about this opportunity ever since I first saw the potential of generative imagery. In 2023, I led the first-ever use case creating digital twins of fashion models and licensing their likenesses for a real luxury campaign.

Our team recognised at that moment that a new creative medium was emerging, one that could preserve and empower creative agency in the AI era for photographers, talent, stylists, artists, and anyone with a unique vision and skillset.

For the creative community, generative AI poses an undeniable risk. It could, quite frankly, upend the world as we know it. But let’s peel back the layer of understandable fear and look at the other side of this disruptive coin. AI also has the potential to unlock imagination and new storytelling formats, and to drive meaningful business value if we build systems that recognise and compensate actual stewards of creativity.

We are entering a new economic era that’s defined by data and the intelligence derived from it. Data has always held great intrinsic value, but much has been untapped due to volume and bandwidth. This ascending intelligence economy is now scaling through machine systems and agentic workflows that interpret, create, and act with increasing autonomy in real-time. 

AI cannot and should not replace human creativity. It lacks judgment, taste, and cultural fluency. It will not tell you which creative hill is worth dying on. AI replicates patterns and relies on the data and context on which it was trained. So the question is, where do we go from here?

The core asset in this new economy is creative capital. Built on human experience and creative intelligence, this capital guides how AI systems are shaped.

We find ourselves in a new Wild West, and the gold rush is not solely reliant on tangible goods or even raw information. It is insight, taste, vision, and domain expertise within the creative human experience.

And yet, the creators behind these inputs are often left without their rightful place at the table. This must change, not just for the ethical treatment of creatives, but also for the authenticity of brands and the future of their goodwill and consumer engagement.

As with past waves of disruptive tech, governance often lags. Some current AI system development and deployment practices have been cringey at best, treating creative work as untraceable, unknowable, and ultimately expendable.

There is an underpinning in mainstream “tech bro” culture to neither ask for permission nor beg for forgiveness. If they move fast enough, they assume no one can keep up, and they will make enough revenue to withstand any potential legal challenges.

It does not have to be this way. We already have the tools to do better. Blockchain-based provenance can authenticate origin, enable transparent licensing and automate royalties. Governance frameworks can embed creator rights directly into AI models and platforms. These systems enable scalable and sustainable innovation. We can do all this today.

Advocating for an equitable intelligence economy means respecting creatives as rights holders with lineage and value, and recognising their individual agency.

Tech progress should not be measured only by efficiency and scale, but also by how well it honors the foundational processes and people that built them.

This is an exciting time to be involved in the creative tech industry because we can and should be architecting AI ecosystems that protect human values, reward creative labour, and demand real artistry alongside automation.

Carrie Crigler is the COO and co-founder of Optikka