Muhammad Rashad

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly changing the arts and creative industries, moving from a technical tool to a creative partner. As AI-generated and AI-assisted works become more common, they raise new questions about who creates art, what counts as original work, who owns the rights and who is responsible for creative work. These changes are especially important in Singapore, where the push to lead in both technology and the creative economy has made it necessary to update laws and policies.

This dissertation looks at the gap between fast-moving creative technologies and the slower changes in legal and policy systems. It explores how AI-generated creative works are changing the way the arts are governed in Singapore, focusing on authorship, copyright ownership and creative responsibility.

Using an exploratory qualitative approach, this study combines analysis of legal texts, policy documents and governance reports with interviews of legal experts, arts administrators, curators and creative practitioners. By bringing together legal, theoretical and practical perspectives, the research examines how AI-generated creativity is understood, managed and regulated in Singapore’s arts and cultural sector from 2017 to 2026.

The findings show that AI is more than just a new tool or medium for art—it changes the legal and cultural rules that have shaped creative work. The study finds that traditional ideas about authorship, based around human intention, originality and personal expression, no longer fully apply. In reality, AI-generated works can come from complex interactions between the artists, developers, data, platforms and institutions. As a result, authorship is becoming more shared, negotiated and dependent on the context.

Copyright ownership of AI-generated works remains unclear. Singapore’s copyright laws still focus on human authors, but in practice, ownership is often decided by contracts, commissions and the degree of human involvement. This leads to confusion, especially when AI works with minimal human input or with multiple contributors. As a result, ownership is moving away from a simple author-based model to one that depends more on the process and situation.

The study also finds that creative responsibility is now shared among many people and groups, such as artists, developers, technology platforms and cultural institutions. It is no longer possible to hold just one creator accountable. Instead, responsibility is shared and negotiated, often through new practices such as disclosure rules, ethical guidelines and governance frameworks. However, enforcement remains uneven, revealing a gap between what policies intend to cover and what happens in practice.

In summary, this dissertation shows that AI-generated creative works are forcing a rethink of the creativity, agency and value in the arts. It calls for more flexible, collaborative and principle-based ways to govern these changes, moving past simple divisions like human versus machine or author versus tool. By adding to research in arts management, copyright law and AI governance, this study provides useful insights for policymakers, cultural institutions and creative professionals as they deal with the changing relationship between AI and human creativity. 

Ultimately, the future of AI in the arts will depend not just on new technology, but on how well society preserves the human values that make creativity meaningful.