Media and Creative Industries and Artificial Intelligence: Heavy Early Use, Unsettled Rights, and an Audience Moving Towards Chatbots

Abstract

Purpose. Media and creative work produce text, images, sound and video, which are the outputs that generative AI makes. This article asks where artificial intelligence stands in the media and creative industries in 2026 and where they may be by about 2035. Design and methods. A review combining the share of the media research literature that involves AI (OpenAlex, 2010–2025), Eurostat's survey of AI use in EU enterprises in publishing, film, television, music and broadcasting (2021–2025), an online experiment on creativity and AI, the Reuters Institute's 2026 survey of news audiences, a streaming company's figures on AI music uploads, labour agreements in the film industry, and the copyright and transparency rules in the United States and the EU. Claims taken from the literature were checked against the sources cited. The scenarios are judgements built on this evidence. Findings. The share of media works that mention AI rose from 0.9% in 2018 to 4.9% in 2025, 5.5 times as much, and language-model works from 70 to 1,681. In the EU, 56.2% of enterprises in publishing, film, television, music and broadcasting used AI in 2025, up from 18.0% in 2021 and the second-highest share after software among the twelve sectors with Eurostat data, nearly three times the 19.9% for all enterprises. Output is changing faster than the rules. A streaming company reported that fully AI-generated tracks rose from about 10% of its daily uploads in January 2025 to above 50% in June 2026, though it did not report their share of listening. In an experiment, access to AI story ideas made stories more creative on average but more similar to one another. Weekly use of AI chatbots for news rose from 7% to 10% of respondents worldwide in a year, with 16% of under-35s, while only 20% trusted the answers. Rights are the open question: the US Copyright Office has concluded that prompts alone do not make a user the author of the output, and music labels have moved from lawsuits to licensing deals with AI music services. We expect AI to be a normal tool in production and distribution by 2028, licensing arrangements to settle the main rights disputes in 2029–2032, and the question of what audiences will pay for to be the open one after that. Originality. The article sets the sector with the second-highest AI use in the EU beside experimental evidence on the limits of AI creativity, an audience survey and a company's upload data, and treats rights and transparency rules as part of the outlook, not as a footnote.