beyond policy lab 4
Infrastructure that Thrives: A Live Lab on AI Governance for Arts Management Professionals
The session on arts managers brought together the entire time from Art Spire, an arts management and consulting company specialising in the development and management of artistic initiatives, founded by Ramya Rajaraman in Chennai. The team comprised 9 women.
The group began with a simple introductory prompt that asked the participants to reflect on their entry into this work, and the learnings they’ve gained on power and care.
Ramya Rajaraman came to arts management from a marketing background. Her work has reinforced her belief that empathy is a key factor to building a thriving and sustainable arts ecosystem.
Mangalam Sridhar began her journey into arts management from an academic background in public relations. Reflecting on power and care brought to mind the way AI and arts are interacting at the moment in India, and how little effort is going toward sustaining the arts in the face of AI tools being used to produce art with as little as a prompt as an input.
Namrata Ratnam came into the field of arts management from the field of design. She notices how life has become a rat race – with fields that were not competitive suddenly becoming sites of competition. Her reflection on power and care helped her see how the emergence of AI has also complicated the field of producing art.
Aswini Ravichandran’s entry into arts management followed a career pivot from the world of engineering. Her experience has highlighted the clear dichotomy of ideologies where one set of people are vying for visibility without caring for authenticity, while another section is solely depending on authenticity to present their art to the world. The emergence of AI has also begun to create shifting goalposts, which is complicating these threads further.
Tulsi Sriram’s background as a visual artist drew her into arts management in her quest for finding something adjacent to the arts to focus on. Her reflection on power and care helped her see how the emergence of AI holds promise for artists in that they can now focus on the process of making their art while leaving their day-to-day admin pieces to AI to handle. She sees this as an act of care for the artform itself, because it makes it a little easier for artists to channel their energy into their art.
Gowri S’ foray into arts management was informed by her background in commerce. She noted that power and care go hand in hand, as artists care for their audiences and have the power to hold the art within themselves and use it to convey their message to their audience. They hold both the power to take the art forward and care for the artform enough to share it with the world.
Archana Murali’s journey into arts management was the result of a seed sowed in her mind during her time as a student of mass communications and economics, and as a musician herself. She sees care itself as a form of power. It is rarely understood that the person who shows up, who remembers the art, and who follows through, is the one who the artist trusts. This reflection is one of both care and power in action.
Power and care is basically, I think, pretty much what a lot of people said. I think the paradox of power, the paradox of care as power, I think care in itself is a form of power. And those who kind of hold things very rarely, they understand that the person who actually shows up.
Subha Sundaram, also a part of the team, preferred to be an observer with the option to offer input when moved to do so.
Varshaa Ganesh came into the world of arts management from a background in business and classical dance. She shared that care gives power direction. Artists have the power to influence people, whether through storytelling or teaching or even showcasing their art in its authentic form – and care guides those decisions.
Naming and framing the problem
The group began with some scene setting that looked at the military origins of AI and how those origins inform the mindsets and worldviews that build AI into existence. The unlocking of profit-making capacities let the tool emerge into civilian life with real-world applications that were defined and brought into fruition through wealthy companies. The group also did recognise that AI has the potential to be a boost for artists of various kinds – be that in supporting them by lifting the weight of their administrative tasks or even in documenting long-held artistic traditions and practices, as several groups world over have shown. They also noted that the use of AI has very real implications for job security, artists’ voices and authenticity, and the erasure of the arts in their original form.
With this critical understanding in place, the group explored three key themes: What arts management knows about the infrastructures and relationships that make art possible, what aspects of art resist quantification, and how we can protect the arts as a space for society to process what it cannot in any other register from being flattened, erased, and sidelined.
Reflecting deeper on Arts Management
In reflecting on the first question, the group noted that cultural infrastructure and cultural content are distinct, but that one cannot exist without the other. The infrastructure scaffolding the arts is both structural and cultural, and involve multiple histories, layers, and nuances that define how the art sustains over time. The group also noted that there is still plenty of room for the infrastructure to evolve in ways that sustain the art, rather than continue to keep the arts within limited containers. This looks like expanding venues, protecting funding for the arts, ensuring non-exploitation of artists, and building legal protections wherever necessary. Relationships are equally critical to the arts, as the collective construction of the art takes place only relationally between the artist and their audiences. The arts simply cannot sustain where one exists and not the other.
As professionals who have spent their careers articulating the value of things that resist quantification of art, of community, of cultural memory, of the slow work of building trust, the group reflected on what we should not lose sight of in the arts in the pursuit of quantification. The group agreed that quality, humility, self-reflection, passion, process, the freedom of expression, and creativity all resist quantification. These attributes are foundational to the arts being what they are and cannot be wished away. The second question also evoked an interesting debate. One participant noted that the process unfortunately gets flattened in the use of an AI tool to create a piece of art. They shared the example of a person who wrote two lines and asked an AI tool to build the whole set of lyrics, compose a song, set it to tune, and produce the entire piece. This person went on to share that music as their own composition. The participant reflected on this example to share that the AI tool had completely flattened the entire process of making music, and its use to make music amounted to plagiarism. To her, this felt like a violation and an unfair use of AI. Another participant offered a different view, sharing that producing a piece of music using an AI tool may not be plagiarism if the tool was only assistive in the journey – and referenced a reflection where if she were to use the AI tool, she would not lose sight of her creativity, but rather use the tool as a vehicle to bring the creativity to light. A third participant reflected on both these streams and articulated the core difference between both – where one was averse to the use of AI as a substitute for the entire journey of making art, and the other was only making the case for using AI as another tool among several. This participant also reflected on how AI does not create art out of thin air: It is always a derivative of something that has been created elsewhere, that constituted the dataset on which the AI tool was trained. The reflection in the group also drew a parallel to the use of a synthesizer, a musical device that imitates several instruments’ sounds without actually being the instrument. The difference though, is that while the synthesizers’ keys might reflect the sounds, it is up to the artist to bring creativity into how the sounds come together to make music. The use of an AI tool is not comparable if it combines the sounds, creates the lyrics, and produces the song in entirety.
The final question asked how we can protect the arts, which have always been the space where a society processes what it cannot say in any other register, from AI use. The group reflected on the interaction of art and AI and asked a meaningful question, namely “Do we really need to protect the arts from AI?” They noted that AI cannot do art in the way humans can and cannot elevate the expression of the arts in ways humans can. They noted that at the end of the day, art will remain art. Another stream of thought the group noted was that AI should not be used in a way that changes, alters, or affects the core grammar of the artform in any way. The core artistic work – where human input is imperative – cannot be replaced with AI in any manner.
Creating a repository of wisdom
The group was invited to share one concept, practice, principle, or embodied understanding from their practice as arts managers that speaks to governance. This generated the following concepts:
The disappearing artist
Disallowing exploitation
Having and understanding the “why” in the process of creation
Empathy as practice
Using a tool as a tool
Protecting authenticity
Reflexivity
The concept of the disappearing artist shows us a lot about how power concentrates at the top. For example, a music director doesn’t produce music that is exclusively, originally “theirs,” but a collated set of original tunes from everyone constituting their team. However, the music that emerges is known as a product of the individual music director. This shows us that power concentrates at the top, and determines which artists become great and which artists will disappear. We have a responsibility to ask not just what exists now, but what will exist in the next generation. For governance, this calls attention to ownership and legacy.
Disallowing exploitation is critical to understand whether the work of another is being used to further the goals of those in power, at the cost of the original work being diluted. Just as an artist deserves to be paid for their work, artists who are responsible for the generation of art need to be compensated too.
The importance of having and understanding a ‘why’ in the process of creation shows us that the value of the work created lies as much in the purpose of creating it as it does in the output of the actual work. This helps artists and all those who engage in the art actually understand the bigger goal, creates accountability, and protects the authenticity of and intentionality behind the work. It helps make decisions more easily and does not allow the impermanence of trends to subsume art.
The idea of empathy as a practice calls on governance to begin with an understanding of the lived realities of artists, their creative processes, challenges, and needs. An empathetic approach can help create more inclusive and supportive systems by ensuring fair opportunities, sustainable remuneration, and greater visibility for artistic work. Beyond the arts, empathy fosters trust, collaboration, and more responsive decision-making, contributing to a society where people and their cultural contributions are valued. Empathy suggests that power is not simply the authority to make decisions, but the responsibility to understand and respond to the needs of those affected by those decisions. In governance, it calls for leaders and institutions to listen, engage, and create conditions where people, especially artists and cultural practitioners can thrive. Responsibility, therefore, lies in using power to build equitable, inclusive, and sustainable systems rather than merely exercising control.
Using a tool as a tool calls on us to recognise the limitations of AI, and the benefits of AI for our work. AI for analysis and research can help one focus on their own practice, understand their audience better, analyse personal practice and improve, pull up data that can benefit the arts, and serve as a live field agent that can support the artist in their administrative focus. This also imposes a responsibility on those who make these tools to not produce tools that scrape the arts to produce art – but rather to produce tools that can help an artist produce their art.
Protecting the authenticity of artistic creation and the process is critical. Meaningful artistic work, whether choreography, music composition, playwriting or performance, comes from the culmination of years of learning, experimentation, reflection, mentorship, and much more that cannot be tangibly quantified. The value of art cannot be seen as the final product but enough focus to be given in the “human” process of creating it. Governance should value how something is created, not only what is created. Process is just as important, if not more than the final product presentation
Reflection, or the art of pausing and questioning at every stage, can be foundational to governing AI. At every stage, when we are invited to reflect on why we are using AI, if we even need AI at that point, and whether it achieves the overarching goal or purpose at all. Taking a pause to reflect strikes at the very root of “move fast and break things” and introduces a measure of deliberation over applying a tool for the sake of it.