First, some context

This piece was written for Dream a Little, a one-time publication by the Centre of Expertise for Creative Innovation (CoECI) — an impact network that connects creative practitioners, researchers, educators and civil-society organisations across Amsterdam’s arts and applied sciences institutions. The publication gathered reflections on creative practice with AI from artists, educators and researchers across partner institutions, of which the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK) is one.

Nadia Piet and I were invited to contribute through the AI Greenhouse, a research project we lead at the Netherlands Film Academy. The article we wrote doesn’t try to settle anything. It starts from a discomfort most creative practitioners will recognise — the hollow promise that AI will make you more productive — and follows it somewhere more interesting: the idea, borrowed from technologist and poet Abdo Hassan, that we have a right to play.

Play, in our framing, is not a soft word. It is how you stay curious without being captured. It is how critical literacy actually forms — not through position papers, but through time spent with something, without immediate pressure to produce.

The Right to Play

The headlines are alarming: film producers are replacing scriptwriters with AI-generated scripts, while VFX studios are favouring algorithms over artists, only to create lower-paid jobs. This pattern repeats across the industry, facing displacement as new forms of precarious labour emerge. Studies even suggest this technology may be weakening our creative capacities, making us lazy in the very craft of storytelling. Meanwhile, the technology consumes vast natural resources, putting humans in competition with machines that never rest.

These concerns are real and well-documented. So how can we justify exploring AI tools in the creative practices we love and have spent years honing and teaching?

The standard answer feels hollow. AI, we’re told, will make us “more productive.” It will help us work faster, giving us more time to think, reflect and create original content. But creative practitioners didn’t choose their fields be more productive. They chose creative work for meaning, self-exploration, mastering a craft, human connection—anything but optimising output.

That’s why, when AI’s primary promise is to help us produce more, faster, we encounter a troubling paradox: the very tools meant to improve the quality of the work we love, risk transforming it into joyless, mechanical labour. There is a word for that: alienation.

The Narrative Problem

The issue isn’t AI as technology—it’s AI as narrative. Silicon Valley promises that technology will elevate humanity through enhanced productivity, and the film industry eagerly adopts this logic. But this promise isn’t new—it echoes centuries-old techno-utopian dreams. The truth is that when we talk about AI, we’re not just choosing tools; we’re choosing which story to perpetuate. And other stories are possible.

Some practitioners are already telling them. Filmmakers like Trevor Paglen, Brett Gaylor, or the research agency Forensic Architecture use AI not to generate footage more quickly, but to investigate how algorithms shape perception, preserve marginalised archives, or expose surveillance systems. Equally important, when production companies opt for open-weights models, or when artists reject generators trained on scraped data without consent, they are creating alternative narratives—ones where creative exploration doesn’t depend on corporate tools or exploitation. These choices matter because they model alternative values; they are acts that influence which stories become normalised in our field. The question isn’t whether to use AI, but how our engagement impacts the narratives driving our field forward.

The Right to Play

As creative professionals, we have an ethical duty to reflect on our practices amidst emerging technologies. Among the debates about AI in creative work, one resonates strongly with us—what technologist and poet Abdo Hassan calls “the right to play.”

This right carries both permission and responsibility. Yes, many AI tools have questionable origins: exploitative datasets, massive resource consumption, and centralisation of power. But zoom out, and these are symptoms of advanced capitalism and techno-utopianism spiralling out of control in today’s society. AI is just the latest manifestation of paradigms we are already embedded in, which are facing a crisis. The question becomes: do we cede this territory completely to corporations, or do we engage consciously—asking which datasets trained this tool, who benefits from its use, and what should remain human?

Better practices aren’t established yet. We’re building them through experimentation, refusal, and sharing what we learn. It’s messy, imperfect work, but it’s how alternative pathways emerge.

At AI Greenhouse, for instance, we’re working with the MAFI Film Collective in Chile, using AI to assist in annotating their audiovisual archive. This isn’t subversive work, but it enables something that limited resources would otherwise prevent. It’s a small example of using AI to support community memory work rather than merely speeding up content production for the sake of feeding algorithms that sustain the endless scroll of social media.

“Play” also means something more profound than practical uses. Johan Huizinga wrote extensively about play as a fundamentally human way of gaining knowledge and creating meaning. Playing with technology—spending time with it in settings without immediate pressure to produce—helps us humanise these systems. It sparks our imagination and assists us in discovering uses that productivity pressures would never reveal.

Play is how we avoid alienation. It’s how we maintain agency. And crucially, it’s how we develop the critical literacy necessary to distinguish between tools that genuinely serve human flourishing and those that merely serve extraction dressed as innovation.