Can AI be creative?
That is the question at the heart of the 5th episode of Reading Ahead, the podcast by the University of Reading that I host. Its the one I put to my guests: Laura Henry-Allain MBE, the children's author and TV producer behind Jojo & Gran Gran, and Dr Dominic Lees, a filmmaker turned academic who leads the University of Reading's Synthetic Media Research Network. Dominic's answer has stuck with me ever since. AI, he said, can only look recombine on what's already been created — while human creativity looks forward, drawing on a lived, felt, embodied experience that no model has access to. It has never smelled a meadow in summer. It doesn't have a grandmother who told it stories, the way Laura's did, stories that eventually became the books that made her career.
That distinction — between what AI can synthesise and what a human being actually is — was the thread that ran through the rest of our conversation. Because if AI can't originate a lived experience, it turns out it can still take one. It can take your voice. Your face. Your gestures. The particular way you tell a story. And increasingly, it's doing exactly that, often without anyone's permission at all.
Laura told us a story that captured this conundrum. Out shopping earlier this year, she was approached by a stranger who struck up a brief, friendly conversation — she assumed nothing of it. Two weeks later, a colleague messaged her a link: she'd been filmed through smart glasses without her knowledge, and the footage was being used to promote someone's confidence-coaching business. She hadn't been asked. Her natural kindness and friendliness had been turned into content. When she asked for it to be taken down, the response was casual — "on this occasion" they would. As if consent were optional, granted at the discretion of whoever happened to be recording.
Dominic's work exists precisely because that story isn't an outlier. On the morning of our recording, he’d been advising an APPG on AI policy. Through his work with the Synthetic Media Research Network, Dominic is proposing a simple extension of existing law. Performers already have legal protection over their likeness and voice as their livelihood. His recommendation is to extend that same protection to every UK citizen — not just professional performers — so that the default position becomes consent first, use second, rather than the reverse.
What struck me by the end of this conversation is that the question of AI and creativity turns out not to be a question about machines at all. It's a question about us — about whether the law will catch up to protect the very things that make us identifiably, unmistakably ourselves: our face, our voice, our story, told in our own way.
You can listen to Reading Ahead on your favourite podcast platform, or watch the full conversation on YouTube.
https://open.spotify.com/show/5tNsx8749eoqbmchQHKMJd?si=e12a3cfe506d4efe