U.S. Regional Arts Organizations have recently launched a policy observatory to track AI and the future of creativity.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the creative sector, and the policy conversation around it is moving just as quickly. A new initiative from the six U.S. Regional Arts Organizations (USRAO) aims to help the arts and culture field keep pace.

With support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the six USRAOs—which collectively serve all 50 states and six U.S. jurisdictions—have spent the past two years tracking developments at the intersection of creativity and AI. The result is CRAIONS: Creativity and AI, a Policy Observatory.

CRAIONS brings together more than 400 developments from around the world—including legislation, court decisions, licensing agreements, labor contracts, platform policies and research—alongside essays that put those developments into context and commissioned works by artists exploring how AI is changing creative practice.

an emerging policy landscape

Rather than treating AI as a collection of individual issues, CRAIONS organizes the emerging policy landscape around three interconnected systems:

• Attribution & Accountability: Who gets recognized, trusted, or held responsible for creative acts?
• Value & Exchange: How is creative labor, data, and attention valued and compensated?
• Cultural Infrastructure & Ecology: How do new tools and norms reshape how culture is produced and sustained?

The Observatory’s early findings raise important questions for everyone who cares about the future of the creative economy. In 70% of the policy and business decisions tracked by CRAIONS, creators were not at the table, a figure that has not improved since 2023.

CRAIONS also finds that AI is breaking creative identity into multiple distinct layers—from things like authorship and provenance to likeness and audience—with some of these layers lacking any established policy mechanism. And, perhaps most concerning for the future creative workforce, the entry-level jobs that have traditionally allowed artists to develop skills, build careers and earn a living are among the types of work most vulnerable to automation.

For Ohio’s creative sector, these developments are not abstract. They touch questions of intellectual property, artist livelihoods, workforce development, and the sustainability of the creative ecosystem. CRAIONS offers an important new resource for understanding those changes, and for ensuring that artists, creative organizations and the communities they serve have a voice in shaping what comes next.