Personalism in Generative AI Deployment: Deciding Ethically When Human Creative Expression is at Stake

You’re listening to “Personalism in Generative AI Deployment: Deciding Ethically When Human Creative Expression is at Stake,” by R. Fioravante and A. Vaccaro. Published in 2025.

Abstract.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) has the potential to automate, integrate or augment human creativity. Current literature reveals that organizations adopting such disruptive technology can both boost or hinder human creativity. Such ambiguity poses an ethical dilemma for decision-makers: while managers are pressured to adopt GAI quickly for optimization, holding on to their economic responsibilities, they must also ensure that its deployment is ethically enrooted and yields people-centered outcomes. This work seeks to discuss and inform managerial decision-making upon GAI deployment, by elucidating how ethically-salient dimensions of human creativity can be safeguarded and supported through GAI adoption. To do so, we draw on Personalism and its account of human creativity, as tied to inner morality and intrinsic dignity of the person.

By this way, we present a model that highlights how three core dimensions—uniqueness, relationality, and unpredictability—are essential to preserve the human element in creative tasks in GAI adoption. Overall, this normative work contributes to enhance our knowledge on personalism within organizational studies, to shed new light on how organizations can safeguard the ethical nexus between human creativity and human intrinsic dignity, and to highlight how humanism in business can support people-centered AI deployment.

Introduction.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has introduced disruptive innovations across industries and contexts, fundamentally altering the landscape of organized social and economic life. This upheaval has placed organizations in a very difficult decision-making environment, where they must navigate the ethical implications of AI deployment while balancing opportunities for progress and risks of dehumanization. The acceleration of technological disruption has amplified all four pillars of the VUCA world: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

The rapid pace of technological advancement often outstrips policy-makers’ ability to effectively address its consequences, presenting volatility and uncertainty as systematic challenges for organizational skills development; furthermore, complexity and ambiguity are intrinsic in the difficult achieving of the goal to harness technological potential while preserving human control.

Key ethical dilemmas emerge for decision-makers who must ensure organizational economic sustainability and success while protecting, respecting and enhancing humanistic goals. From a humanistic perspective, this requires leveraging AI to remain competitive and harness its economic potential, while always using it as a mean to foster human flourishing. Indeed, from a Humanistic perspective, organizations bare moral responsibility to never pursuing technological progress as an end in itself, which would lead to treating human beings as its objects rather than its subjects.

However, the necessity to rapidly design, deploy, and integrate AI technologies into organizational processes, in order to cut edge on competition, poses to decision-makers difficult trade-offs between timely technological innovation and careful assessment of its ethical impacts throughout all AI pipeline. Targeting AI safety, accountability, and ethical compliance beyond legal obligations requires foreseeing ad hoc use of time and resources.

Such trade-offs are of particular salience when arising tied to Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI). GAI, which includes technologies like Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), can generate creative outputs that mimic human creativity. These technologies process large amounts of input data to quickly and efficiently produce text, images, music, and other artistic and creative content. GAI’s potential to replace human creativity in highly skilled and professionalized fields has led to projections of significant rate of human substitution within employment in areas such as education, business, law, and the arts. For the first time in history, looming threats of technological unemployment for high-skilled and educated workforce, as well as for profiles, such as artistic professionals’, which had been so far exempt by these challenges.

Among many other backlashes, the recent prolonged strikes by creative professionals in the U.S. film industry exemplifies the tangible impact of GAI deployment without ethical compliance to respecting critical stakeholders invested by the technological disruption.

Decision-makers confronted with the economic opportunities entailed by GAI adoption are thus most likely to be invested by an ethical dilemma, having to choose whether to prior itize speed in technological adoption or ensuring ethical compliance to technological use for human flourishing purposes. This dilemma is not always present in such a black-or-white facet, presenting many grey area situations, where balancing economic profitability and AI human safety are both present in different degrees; nonetheless, targeting human-centered AI, AI accountability, and ethical compliance, even beyond legal obligations, requires foreseeing ad hoc use of time and resources. Furthermore, it requires extensive ethical organizational awareness in recognizing its dehumanization perils and undesirable impacts.

Although the goal to design and build safe AI and to use it for positive social impacts is widely discussed and pursued, literature on the topic has underlined the widespread presence of many risks associated with underestimation, misinterpretation, and lack of awareness regarding AI-related ethical issues. The latter can lead to “ethical bashing”, “ethical washing,” harming human safety, as well as hindering organizational reputation and stakeholder relationships.

This work aims to discussing the ethical dimension associated with this dilemma, specifically when discussing GAI use. GAI has the potential to automate, and/or augment and integrate a specific human feature, i.e. human creative expression. The latter holds outmost significance in the recognition of human dignity, in ensuring human flourishing through meaningful vocational paths within work life, in expressing personal morality and spirituality within and outside the workplace. We therefore contend that decision-making upon GAI, by impacting a morally salient dimension, as the one of human creative expression, are decision-making processes with a distinct ethical content. This poses an ethical dilemma that calls into question organizational responsibilities.

Organizations bear the responsibility to ensuring economic sustainability through technological innovation, as well as to fostering human flourishing through creative expression. As above recalled, these two responsibilities, when confronted with GAI use, might be presenting reciprocal tensions, as profit maximization goals requires speed in GAI adoption, while the moral duties to ensure that human creative expression is not harmed and fully supported requires additional time and resources. We therefore seek to present and suggest ethically-enrooted guidance to what will be framed as “Optimization vs. Human Creative Expression” dilemma (see section “Human Creative Expression at Stake”).

Organizational literature has already enquired into the relationship between AI deployment and human augmentation or automation, eventually finding a consensus over integration between human-led and technological-led tasks and processes. Furthermore, speculation on the creative industry’s future has addressed GAI transformation on a macro-level perspective of market reassessing. Meanwhile, ethical challenges tied to GAI adoption have mostly been discussed as linked to ethical assessments of the role and value of creative outputs rather than human creativity: major debates are confronting the legitimacy and regulation of AI-generated artifacts commercialization, copyright issues related to training data sourced from human-created works, as well as ethical shortcomings of mass production of fakes, deepfakes and misinformation without human supervision content.

Only a minority of the debate has focused on consequences of human creativity automating/integrating on the person, as beholder of intrinsic value expressed by many means, among which artistic creativity is one of the most relevant. Indeed, optimization and efficiency purposes might themselves be unethical when entail disregarding of human fundamental attributes and human capabilities enhancing. While current debates focus on human-technological integration for optimization and efficiency goals, and deal with GAI’s impact on creative industries mainly focusing on the evolving landscape of internal competition, we contend that organizational decision-making process on GAI use should address its impact on the person and one’s creative expression, thus foreseeing suitable processes to protect and enhance it.

We add to these debates by drawing on an established tradition within business ethics and humanistic management scholarship, which is normative in nature and scope. More in detail, we discuss the moral tenants of human creative expression by resorting to Personalist philosophy. Personalism offers a unique framework for understanding human exceptionalism and irreplaceability, thus placing highest focus on which human attributes should never be disregarded. This philosophical approach has a strong tradition within organizational studies, especially in underpinning “integral humanism”. Personalism’s focus on human dignity and the relational ontology of the person has been effectively integrated with major theoretical approaches in the field, including virtue ethics and practical wisdom studies.

In this work, we explore three dimensions of human creativity drawn from personalist philosophy, particularly the work of Maritain, which emphasizes the role of creativity in a expressing the person’s intrinsic morality and, therefore, dignity and irreplaceability. We build on this understanding to present a three-dimensional model based on uniqueness, relationality, and unpredictability. By this way, this work addresses the following research question: How can organizations pursue ethical decision-making in deploying GAI without undermining human creative expression?

This model aims to inform managerial decision-making over technological advancements, balancing ethical use of GAI with human-centered goals, thereby preventing major threats of dehumanization. Our contribution extends to humanistic management paradigms, which view organizations as vehicles for achieving human flourishing and the common good. By discussing organizations’ ethical stance on preserving and enhancing human creativity, we align with a distinctive vision of human dignity as non-negotiable in business and work contexts.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section “Human Creative Expression at Stake” provides an overview of GAI impact on human creativity and related ethical challenges in its use for optimization purposes. Section “Personalism and Human Creativity” presents and discuss Personalist philosophy characterization of human creative expression and its three fundamental dimensions. Section “Uniqueness, Relationality, and Unpredictability in GAI Deployment” presents a three-dimensional model for GAI implementation, based on the three highlighted dimensions of human creative expression, drawn from personalism Section “Discussion” summarize the discussion of personalism as relevant phi losophy in safeguarding human exceptionalism in GAI use and section “Contributions to the Literature, Conclusions and Limitations” highlights contributions, conclusions and future paths of research.

Human Creative Expression at Stake

In this section, we outline two primary sources of potential ethical shortcomings associated with the deployment of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) without proper ethical compliance, which neglects human creativity and thus demands priority attention from decision-makers. First, the disregarding of artists in organizational use of GAI, eventually leading to copyright infringements, through the use of their work without proper recognition. Second, there is the potential de facto restriction on creative tasks within organizations, which traditionally allow individuals with artistic and creative professional skills to express their talents and fulfill their vocational callings. These two major ethical shortcomings can concur to what we highlight can be an optimization vs. human expression dilemma.

Art Without Artists

“I won, and I didn’t break any rules” stated Mr. Allen, winner of the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s art competition, after having submitted a work authored as “Jason M. Allen via Midjourney” (2022). In April 2023, artist Boris Eldagsen came clean to the jury, which had awarded him the First Prize in the Sony World Photography Award, confessing that his artifact had been created via generative artificial intelligence. Before the diffusion of other popular GAI image generators, Google’s project DeepDream paved the way that led to developers discussing the aesthetic value of an automated creation. Artist Refik Anadol’s exhibition of AI-generated artwork, “Unsupervised” at MoMa in NY, has led to question artists’ control over GAI generated artifacts.

The question “can there be art without artists?” is haunting the artists and creatives community (both freelance and in organizations) and, by extension, all organizations involved with deploying artistic and creative works or in their commercialization. Generative art has been defined as: “In G-art, (df.) the artwork is generated, at least in part, by some process that is not under the artist’s direct control”. Technologies such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, Beatoven.ai, and Midjourney are now able to write complex texts, create pictures, recreate works of art by famous artists, compose music, reproduce voices, engage in videomaking, even create pictures of human beings who never biologically existed.

Leading corporations like Microsoft, Google, and Adobe have developed their proprietary GAI technology for content and image creation for various commercial applications ranging from customer services to personalized advertising.

The diffusion of such technologies has sprung debates on the relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence regarding participation in the creative output: is the latter authored by the human artist, the machine, by both, or by the developer of the code?. The debate is still open on whether GAI should be considered a tool like traditional ones (just like a brush for the painter) or whether the creative process is embedded within GAI development, thus enabling the technology to behave as an automated creator with its own set of capabilities. Such a perspective has a direct impact on the market value of the GAI artifact. To assess it, the ontological status of the outputs created using GAI has been under scrutiny. Luciano Floridi coined the label “ectype”, to define an artifact that is simultaneously human and machine art.

The regulatory framework on GAI use in creative work is still evolving.

Furthermore, lack of transparency and disclosure over GAI input training has unveiled several shortcomings in GAI responsible design and use, as well as in trust towards GAI creative outputs. An outstanding example is the series of high-profile legal disputes within GAI developers and the creative industry. Authors like Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham, represented by the Authors Guild, argued that OpenAI’s use of their copyrighted works for training AI models like ChatGPT violates their rights, emphasizing rule adherence and individual rights protection. Similarly, The New York Times challenged OpenAI’s unauthorized use of its archives for AI training, highlighting the conflict between respecting intellectual property and the belief in AI’s societal benefits through technological progress.

Universal Music Group confronted AI-generated music platforms, claiming infringement on artists’ rights. This has raised protests by the media about input gathering for algorithmic training purposes. Similarly, Getty Images has sued Stability AI, owner of Stable Diffusion, for having trained GAI algorithms with copyrighted images, and artists are now concerned about using their work for input database creation without their consent. While all these examples might be analyzed as revolving around unclear property and copy rights attributions, they also reflect a wider ethical shortcoming.

The latter stems from confronting a deontological perspective, focused on safeguarding artists’ moral rights and professional upbringing, against the utilitarian argument of GAI’s developers who underline GAI potential to allow increased access and use towards creative purposes for a higher number of people, thus realizing the potential societal benefits of AI innovations. Using human artifacts as GAI input has consequences not only on commercial value of such artifacts, rather also on the artists who poured their artistic vocation in their making.

Poetry Does Not Optimize

AI systems have indeed been defined as “human-competitive intelligence” by the tens of thousands of signatories of the call to “pause AI experiments for six months” addressed to US Congress in May 2023 by distinguished professors and global business leaders, such as Professor Noal Harari and Elon Musk. The latter has focused, among other significant concerns, on the ethical relevance and meaning of displacing jobs that are considered fulfilling from professional and personal points of view.

Such concern has been reinforced, for example, by OpenAI releasing the DALL-E 2 system (OpenAI website) on April 22, reports: “the model may increase the efficiency of performing some tasks like photo editing or production of stock photography, which could displace jobs of designers, photographers, models, editors, and artists” (Quoted in Knight 2022). Indeed, Alibaba has widely replaced artists with prompt designers in advertising design, paving the way to possible mass creative professionals’ job displacement. Further more, legal and ethical issues of third-party recognition arise due to human replacement, as individuals and organizations most affected by replacement threats are directly or indirectly involved in training GAI technologies.

Google has recently implemented GAI technology in its “Search Generative Experience” by providing search results for GAI-produced texts instead of links to media and other sources.

Platforms such as Prompt Attack have created a marketplace for privates, organizations, and professionals looking for ready-made creative models and a marketplace for training services of prompt engineers working alongside artists or replacing them. Hence, issues of the artistic and market value of the artifact have collapsed into prompt designing exchange value, deploying efficiency considerations on whether to hire human creators or buy fast designing services. Such platforms now directly impact art management and organizations operating within the production of cultural goods. Although GAI’s potential to boost or harm human creativity is still being debated it has unequivocally proven valuable in speeding up content production and critical for competitive advantage.

While an international group of creativity scholars has proposed a “Manifesto” aimed at outlining the “Fundamental Laws of Generative AI”, focusing on diverse aspects of what is defined as a desirable model of human-machine cooperation in the creative field, skepticism on GAI replacing artists and intellectuals is rising. Critical scholars are warning that human creativity might be harmed by GAI if creativity is wrongly understood: “Should the principles of efficiency, speed, and so-called blessings of scale apply so unequivocally to creative processes? After all, poetry does not optimize” (Elam, Stanford HAI report 2023, p. 10–11). Such warnings are drawn from a variety of sources and scholarships.

Research on human decision-making and human expression has underlined how the human brain is better equipped than AI to respond to unpredictable and unstable scenarios, therefore making it impossible to substitute humans in some sensible areas. Others have underlined how human substitution in critical tasks can lead to losing control over processes central to human existential meaningfulness. Developers themselves are addressing the threats of human substitution: Alexander Wang, CEO of @scaleai (ScaleAI), tweeted: (May 18, 2023) “important 2nd order effect of LLMs: tools like ChatGPT create a form of laziness (“I’ll just use the AI for that”) that must be bad, what makes the best works of humanity so great is that every detail is consciously sweat by an obsessive soul, not a huge fan of this change”.

The possible substitution of human expression through the use of GAI artistic outputs falls under a wider issue of ethical AI design and use. The latter has been summarized as the tendency to humanizing machines—building technologies able to mimic human behavior and expression—and engineering humans—subjecting humans to predictability, determinism, efficiency requirements, which are usually associated with technological devices. Such AI implementation can easily lead to organizations being caught in the process of following technological fast-pace progress not as a mean to enhance human possibilities (among which, creativity is a critical one); rather, designing organizational strategies and evolutions around technological innovations needs, disregarding its human impact.

The Optimization vs. Human Creative Expression dilemma relies in difficult choices on how to solve tensions between production speed goals, pursued through augmentation of workforce skills and automation, and the protection and enhancement of human expression in creative task, which does not respond to the same efficiency maximization goal. Among a variety of ethical theories discussed to face such ethical conundrums, in the next paragraph we contend that personalist philosophy, thanks to its understanding of human creativity and its underpinning to universal and integral humanism, is particularly relevant to face GAI-related ethical issues above presented.

Personalism and Human Creativity

In the following section, we draw on Personalism1 and its account of human creativity as an ethically-salient expression of the intrinsic dignity of the person. We briefly recall major Personalist contributions, and then we highlight three dimensions that, according to personalist though, define human creativity: uniqueness, relationality, and unpredictability. Through these three dimensions the human person expresses one’s exceptionalism and irreplaceability. Thus, we seek to discuss all relevant challenges tied to GAI and human creativity discussed in section “Human Creative Expression at Stake”, by resorting to Personalism and its ethical implications.

Personalism as Integral Humanism

Personalism, as a stream of thought, compelling secular and confessional traditions, offers a unique understanding of the irreplaceability and non-interchangeability of each human being. Indeed, the work of some of its leading proponents, such as Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) and Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), have paved the way for what is now known as “integral humanism”. Personalist philosophy and “The Personalist Principle”, both considering the relative phenomenological strand (for instance, Scheler 1973) and its anthropological realism-based strand, have been discussed as a fitting integration to virtue ethics approaches in business and management. Personalism has been recalled as setting “minimal ethical requirements” to respect and protect human dignity (Melé 20092015) in workplaces and organizations.

This vision, applied to organizational studies, has been defined as the “ends-orientation of personalist humanistic management”.

Personalism, as a broad tradition of thought, has originally been conveyed within the first half of the XX century. It has been popularized, among others, in France thanks to the work of Emmanuel Mounier, through the journal Esprit and its pillar “Personalism”, published in 1938, containing its major principles; as well as by Jacques Maritain, whose cornerstone work “Integral Humanism” (1936) served to bridge personalist ethics with Catholic intellectuals and Christian thinkers, thanks to his drawing on Thomistic influences. Gabriel Marcel continued the legacy with his “The Mystery of Being” (1950) which enquired into personalism and existential philosophy. Within the German scenario, Martin Buber contributed to Personalism with its “I and Though” (1923), where he posed the basis for personalist’s focus on relationships and dialogical perspective.

A major contribution to personalism has been gathered by the thought of Karol Wojtyła (Pope John Paul II), including his work “Love and Responsibility” (1960) and the dissemination of the Personalist Principle in later encyclicals. Personalism accounts for different sub-streams of thought, with significant differences in terms of ontological foundations and underlying assumptions. Just to name a few, Theistic Personalism grounds the intrinsic value and dignity of the person as tied to the transcendental dimension of God’s creation, emphasizing that human beings are created in the image of God. Existential Personalism focuses on the individual’s freedom, authenticity, and responsibility, emphasizing the subjective experience and the importance of personal choice.

Phenomenological Personalism, particularly through the work of Max Scheler, focuses on the first-person perspective and the unique ways in which individuals experience the world and relate to others. For the purpose of this paper, we will focus on key common concepts of Personalism, which can be found in all its sub-streams (although with minor different accents). For a comprehensive discussion please refer to.

While recalling works from multiple authors, we will place particular emphasis on the thought of Jacques Maritain: first, as his perspective is able to bridge confessional and secular traditions; secondly, as his contribution has been institutionally and universally recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; third, as he focused specifically on human creativity in depicting his personalist view.

Personalist understanding is based on the distinction between the concept of the “person” and the “individual”. While the person represents a whole in herself, the individual is fungible and understood in its exteriority, as one element among others of a set: this perspective allows to draw a distinction between the person as irreplaceable and unique, and the individual as one among other units. Indeed, such is the understanding of the person: “combines subjectivity and objectivity, causal activity and receptivity, unicity and relation, identity and creativity”. The being “somebody” of the person, distinctive from being “something”, directly stems from one’s interiority and self-consciousness, which bestow upon human existence the intrinsic feature of irreplaceability.

Through such a combination, the person expresses unique metaphysical qualities which distinguish humanity from any other being. Secondly, according to Personalism, the subject always concerns the person in relation to other personhoods; the person can exist only in such relation. While the individual being can be ontologically understood as detached from others, the person only exists in exchange and relation with the otherness. This understanding of personhood as situated within a relational sphere is consistent with merging the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach and Scheler’s view acquired by Wojtyla in refashioning the Personalist philosophy. As Alford summarizes: “In other words, as persons, we are intrinsically related to others, meaning that our ‘beingrelated’ is ontological, a part of our very being itself”.

Creativity as Human Exceptionalism

The two specifics of personalism understanding of the human being, contributes to design the concept of human exceptionalism. The latter is founded in human irreplaceability, in human ontological relationship with the other, as well as in human creativity. The topic is explicitly addressed in Maritain’s and Mounier’s work, when discussing topics such as human artistic vocation, “poetic thinking”, the creative act as a major expression of interiority, as well as the loci for the exchange between interiority and exteriority. By resorting to this body of work, it is possible to identify critical dimensions of human creative expression which organizations bare responsibility to support, inasmuch these dimensions are critical to human dignity and irreplaceability.

The first recurring dimension is the one of uniqueness.

According to Personalism, the originality of the artifact directly stems from the creator’s uniqueness and participation in the creative act. In Mounier’s understanding, uniqueness is a quality that distinguishes every human being: “[art] is the sensitive expression, throughout the whole range of our existence, of life’s intimately unexpected character”. Indeed, the act of creation is so entrenched with its creator that “Yet the creative impulse always acts through the single person, though he may afterwards be lost in the crowd; every folk song has its first original composer: and even when all men are to become artists, there would not be one art, but as many varieties of art as there were men”. Thus, creative expression is understood as an expression of the inner self.

It cannot be detached from the person’s feature of being at the same time, as above recalled, material and transcendental: “From a transcendental personalist point of view, a truly human activity (be it economic, esthetic, political, intellectual, or of any other kind) includes free engagement with and for others and contributes to the moral growth of those engaging in it, and of those to whom the activity is addressed”. Such vision is also consistent with Maritain’s discussion of creativity. In his vision, uniqueness is the attribute of creativity that stems from the creator’s participation of one’s inner self in the creation. The irreplaceability of the person in the act of creation makes it an expression of her intrinsic dignity as an integral human being.

The second dimension is relationality. The person is ontologically defined by her/his relation to the other personhoods, thus the artistic creation is, at the same time, the expression of the creator’s interiority, as well as something that calls into dynamics the other persons. Such dynamic has been summarized as: “creativity which affects both the surrounding world and the person himself”. Such tension stems from a primordial human need to communicate. In this way, creativity is characterized primarily not because of specific features of the output, rather because the creator participates in the creation through a situated process taking place in a dynamic between different personhoods in reciprocal recognition.

As Maritain points out: “The poet can only express his own substance in a work if things resound in him, and if, in him, at the same awakening, they and he emerge together from sleep”. Relationality is the attribute of human creativity which characterize the purely human effort of expressing not only one’s self in creation, but a world of relations as translated in the output. The ontological relation to the other personhoods plays a defining role in orienting one’s creative expression, stemming from the interiority, towards the exteriority and backwards.

The third dimension is unpredictability. In Personalism, the act of creation revolves around the exercise of freedom beyond necessity: “its [creativity] central affirmation being the existence of free and creative persons, it introduces into the heart of its constructions a principle of unpredictability [...]”. The Personalist view understands such human freedom as “terminal freedom”: the latter is the human attribute according to which the person’s freedom is not limited to choosing between already given options, but rather consists in creating new options, scenarios, and possibilities. The human being has the ultimate possibility of inserting something new in the existing world, thus is core of the act of creativity.

Maritain asks, “What are, in the poet, the novelist, the man dedicated to any creative art, the relations between the exigencies of poetry and intellectual creativity and those of moral standards, which have to do with the right use of human free will?”. The human use of terminal freedom is inherently unpredictable in its outcomes, and creativity expresses such freedom through being tied to the person’s morality: each act of creation follows an un-predetermined will. Just as terminal freedom itself, the act of free creativity becomes a “finis ultimus simpliciter”: an end for its own sake. By this way the creative act is unpredictable in its output, as well as because of the very existence of terminal freedom as the possibility of creation in itself, without output’s scope.

Recalling Maritain’s work: “The essential points to be made concerning poetic knowledge can, I believe, be expressed as follows: The activity of art is not in itself an activity of knowledge, but of creation; art aspires to creating an object in accordance with that object’s inner needs and its own good”. In Personalism, the act of creation revolves around the exercise of terminal freedom beyond necessity: “its [creativity] central affirmation being the existence of free and creative persons, it introduces into the heart of its constructions a principle of unpredictability [...]”. The person’s fundamental irreplaceability stems from the unpredictable act of expressing one’s inner moral attribute of terminal freedom, one’s act of creation for its own sake.

Uniqueness, Relationality, and Unpredictability in GAI Deployment

In the following section, we discuss how decision-makers can ethically guardrail GAI deployment in creative tasks by safeguarding the three main dimensions, drawn from personalism, through which each person expresses one’s human irreplaceability and exceptionality. By this way, personalism can help organizations in solving ethical dilemmas arising when using GAI, by helping them to recognize, safeguard and enhance human intrinsic value as tied to personal creativity.

Uniqueness Through Co-Designing and Participation

Contemporary copyright regulations have traditionally been grounded in the conception that artistic works encapsulate the creator’s individuality, aligning with the Personalist notion of uniqueness. This viewpoint asserts that the artifact’s uniqueness stems from the distinctive traits of human personality and their involvement in the creative process. However, the application of Generative AI (GAI) technology introduces complexities regarding the preservation of unique attributes. For instance, Google’s DeepDream. Google’s DeepDream outputs have been defined as “unique and unpredictable”. outputs have been described as “unique and unpredictable,” yet devoid of personal expression or interiority attributable to human creators.

Although GAI mimics aspects of human consciousness, the absence of direct personal participation in the creation process raises questions about the uniqueness of the generated output. Similarly, when examining AI-generated creations emulating the style of artists like Rembrandt, Floridi argues that, while certain stylistic elements may be recognizable, the particular intent or emotional expression intended by the human artist remains elusive. The absence of the creator’s direct involvement in the process undermines claims of uniqueness within the output.

However, it is conceivable that certain applications of GAI may not necessitate the presence of uniqueness within the output, particularly in mass production contexts such as advertising. Nevertheless, to ascertain the impact of GAI on human creativity, it is imperative to facilitate a participatory approach whereby creative professionals contribute insights into the compatibility of GAI deployment with their creative processes and objectives. This entails collaborative decision-making processes involving both creative professionals and organizational stakeholders to ensure that GAI implementation aligns with ethical imperatives while addressing efficiency goals.

Informed by a multistep participation process, ethical decision-making regarding GAI’s integration into creative professions should prioritize the preservation of personal expression and intervention by artists. Solutions that empower creative professionals to articulate their creative needs allows for an artists’ protagonism in mitigating potential drawbacks of GAI deployment, thus fostering a smoother transitioning and an harmonious balance between technological advancement and artistic integrity. Such processes can draw inspiration from existing programs facilitating continuous feedback from humans over AI-generated outcomes, ultimately aiming to capture and address artists’ viewpoints (counterbalancing fears and hopes) to improve GAI unfolding through bottom-up feedbacks implementation.

Relationality Through Integration

The interrelation between the creator’s personality and diverse aspects of personhood is a fundamental tenet within Personalist’s understanding of human creativity. Creative endeavors not only evoke emotional responses from audiences but also reflect the emotional inner life of the creator, which develops in relation to other personhoods. However, contemporary Generative AI (GAI) technologies often lack an understanding of value and related emotions, as noted in manifestos by creative scholars.

Similarly, novelists demonstrate a degree of participation and empathy with their characters, fostering engagement and empathy from readers. When examining examples such as AI-generated artworks in the style of Rembrandt, it becomes evident that a crucial relationship needs to be established between the creator, the subject depicted, and the potential audience, termed as the “ectype.”

In contemporary industries reliant on GAI for artistic and creative output design, careful attention must be paid to the relationship between creators and external stakeholders. While GAI accelerates the creative process and enables exploration of numerous possibilities in a shorter time frame, it lacks the continuous exchange between different perspectives inherent in human interaction. Relationality, a core aspect of human expression through creativity, can be revitalized through correct assessment and intervention.

The absence of relationality within automated content generation processes can lead to depersonalization within the creative process, particularly in instances where relational dynamics play a significant role, such as advocacy campaigns for NGOs or social movement groups. Key features of the creative process, such as understanding nonverbal communication and detecting implicit messages, are deeply intertwined with relationality and risk being overlooked without human guidance.

Text-to-image systems (such as those adopted by Midjourney and others discussed above) rely on a wide variety of online datasets, with unclear copyright attributions. Nonetheless, from an ethical perspective, one of the main challenges connected to achieving the desired outputs are not only tied to quality, quantity and ownership of data used as inputs, as well as to considerations on the audience’s reactions. While GAI systems, especially GANs, are undergoing a process of training towards recognizing emotions and reproducing some emotional states themselves, situating the creative process within a reciprocal dynamic of recognizing and interacting with values, beliefs, and complex social dynamics, still needs human intervention.

To address these challenges, organizations aiming to integrate GAI technologies into creative processes should prioritize the integration of skilled professionals in prompt engineering with humanistic experts in artistic and intellectual endeavors. This multidisciplinary approach ensures that the relational aspect of the creative process is preserved, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of audience needs and the broader societal impact of creative outputs.

Unpredictability Through Human Oversight and Halt Intervention

According to Personalism, unpredictability qualifies the creative endeavor as something through which the person exercises terminal freedom, exceeding simple liberties of choosing rationally between different options, terminal freedom ignites new possibilities into reality. Even when the creative endeavor is oriented toward market purposes or any given commercial aim, the person who creates consciously acts towards it and, by so doing, determines its inner scope In the same facet, he/she can refuse to do so and modify its scope. Creative expression relates to the creator’s morality through terminal freedom. The entrustment of creative tasks to AI precipitates profound inquiries into the assignment of responsibility, as underscored by Johnson (2015) and Chiodo (2022).

Despite assertions of technological neutrality, the genesis of unethical outcomes rests squarely upon the individuals, organizations, and institutions engineering and embracing such technologies.

Efforts to ameliorate biases and discrimination through dataset adjustments and algorithmic interventions are conceivable, yet ethical oversight of content appropriateness remains primarily within the purview of human responsibility. This challenge extends to both image and text creation by GAI, where ethical perspectives and intentions of creators are not conveyed, as observed in the case of Google’s Bard search engine. Google’s Bard, for instance, has been met with criticism from media professionals and organizations, who perceive it as a substitute for editorial intermediation and raise ethical concerns regarding GAI’s ability to produce accountable outputs through automated summarization. Cathy Edwards, Google’s VP of search, emphasized the deliberate omission of subjective expressions, stating, “It won’t respond with ‘I think’ or express opinions on things.

It is not something that feels like a lot of other chatbots out there”. Paradoxically, removing persona, even if fictional, can enhance perceptions of objectivity and neutrality, qualities unattainable by humans or algorithms. While editorial intermediation fosters diverse interpretations, GAI output is tethered to existing frameworks, necessitating careful implementation of disclaimers and human oversight to prevent the dissemination of unethical content.

Humans in the loop may contribute to various stages of the GAI process, including dataset curation, content validation, and decision-making regarding the appropriateness of generated outputs. This can be attained by reinforcing the presence of human reviewers to evaluate the output of GAI models, flagging potentially harmful or inappropriate contents before such models are released to the public. A crucial target should be making as hard has possible the use of GAI for unethical purposes which would rise fundamental ethical objections from humans.

Discussion.

GAI’s potential for enhancing social welfare through supporting human productivity and simultaneously hindering social welfare through potentially limiting humans’ intellectual and artistic expression is presented. This work suggested to confront this GAI related ethical risk through organizational applications of Personalist philosophy, adding to an established body of literature within the field.

The three highlighted dimensions in section “Personalism and Human Creativity” and the correspondent organizational guidelines discussed in Section “Uniqueness, Relationality, and Unpredictability in GAI Deployment”, resonate with established traditions in business ethics and humanistic management scholarship, both on people-centered organizations and humanism in AI organizational challenges. First, participation of critical stakeholders’, especially internals, to the firm’s decision-making process, is enrooted in the application of the Aristotelic-Thomistic tradition to organizational studies. According to this vision, the person’s intrinsic dignity can be recognized an enhanced by one’s involvement in decision-making, facilitating ethical conduct and ethically desirable decisions’ output.

More in depth, the Thomistic roots of such tradition is shared both by Catholic Social Teaching accounts of human flourishing, as well as by Maritain’s personalist thought. Participation is thus key for organizations aiming to preserve uniqueness as a critical dimension: it allows personal voicing of needs, fears and suggestions concerning GAI use, directly stemming from the creative professional’s experience and expertise. Furthermore, it recognizes the person’s intrinsic value in involving one’s unique view in the decision-making process, giving each member of the organization the opportunity to contribute to codesigning technological transition, respecting each person’s entitlement to ideas, values and beliefs.

Personalism can thus support organizations preserving uniqueness through participation and codesigning, indicating the application of a Thomistic approach in GAI deployment: ethical dilemmas have to be solved by considering the impact of decision-making outputs on all involved stakeholders.

The second highlighted dimension, relationality—as conveyed by personalist thought, is crucial in assessing boundaries of technological development which, if disrespected, would hurt creative capacity. More in depth, the personalist account of human creative expression as tied to relational dynamics helps organizations in considering the types of expertise which are needed to be integrated throughout GAI pipeline, in order support human creativity rather than barely automating some of its tasks. Such perspective is consistent with already discussed links between personalism and practical wisdom: personalism helps in recognizing the intrinsic valuable contribution of the creative effort as tied to its output on the audience, on peers, on the otherness.

By this way, integration of creative professionals with prompt-engineers and other technical figures required by GAI implementation, can lead to improved creative processes. The latter can take advantage of personal and professional creative experiences and artistic insights which would be less tackled by technicians. Personalism can support organizations aiming to preserving relationality as a fundamental dimension of human expression, by indicating to inform their decision-making process with considerations of multiple skills integration between technical and artistic profiles, to preserve creative intrinsic dignity of all people involved.

Third, personalism assesses “unpredictability” as a fundamental dimension of human creative expression. It does so by strictly tying creativity to moral capacity of the person and, more in detail, one’s uniquely human ability to exert “terminal freedom”. As morality and moral responsibility, both at individual and organizational level, are indeed enrooted in human freedom, decision-making on automating tasks should foresee that human creativity remains in the position of being expressed in an integrally moral way. Automation of content creation, indeed, often leads to increased number and easiest creation of unethical content, from fake news to voluntarily deceptive contents. Unethical content creation is not only tied to purposefully deception, but also to significant perils of organizations losing control over the creation process.

Keeping human oversight and control over content creation is thus a way to enable human exercise of moral judgement on critical organizational processes involving automated or partially automated creative tasks. Furthermore, personalism assesses the principle of terminal freedom as tied to human uniqueness, thus posing outmost relevance to keeping humans in charge of the “last word” upon creative outputs release, as machines would not and cannot be held morally accountable for their outputs. Personalism can thus inform organizations decision-making processes upon relevant sites and steps of human intervention and human halting power over GAI pipeline in output release, thus preserving moral control over output from complete automation.

In order to avoid the ethical risk of harming fundamental human attributes through GAI adoption, we resumed to Personalism to clarify the ethical relationship between human creativity and human irreplaceability and exceptionality, thus, we suggested some correspondent coherent exemplary practices. Indeed, identifying both ethical content and ethical structure, are the two basis requisites considered as minimal starting point for all AI ethical risk management and compliance effective programs.

Contributions to the Literature, Conclusions and Limitations

This work expands the body of normative literature, informing ethically-driven managerial decisions, keen on disruptive technological innovations in organizations. It does so, in two ways:

First, we contribute to the philosophical debate underpinning humanistic management literature by adding to literature on personalism as integral humanism, by expand our knowledge on the application of personalist philosophy to creativity in business organizations. More in detail, we expand current literature on personalism in organizational studies by focusing on human creative expression and its moral meaning and implications, by highlighting personalist contribution in assessing creativity as a major driver of human uniqueness and irreplaceability. By this way, we contribute in strengthening the body of inquiry into how personalism philosophy can guide organizations in preserving and enhancing critical dimensions, such as creative expression, of human flourishing. Furthermore, we expand our knowledge of human creativity as tied to morality within business ethics scholarship.

Second, we contribute to literature, within the humanistic management paradigm, keen on exploring the nexus between technological innovation and its challenges to humanistic organizations, by focusing on the impact of GAI on human creativity. While non-humanistic literature has focused on ethical aspects of GAI impacts on creative outputs, this work refocuses the ethical debate on the centrality of the person and the role of organizations in preserving and enhancing human creative expression as tied to human inner morality and dignity. By this way, we provide a non-consequentialist ethical framework to confront ethical dilemmas arising in GAI deployment, adding to the humanistic body of literature enquiring into organizational moral duty to prioritize human dignity as non-negotiable dimension of its activity.

Personalist ethics, applied by decision-makers, can inform their moral judgment on processes, policies and practices aimed to building technological advancements in service of human flourishing and wellbeing, rather than treating human capabilities as a mean to technological progress and production optimization. Overall, our contribution addresses a particular case, AI and creative tasks, which contributes to a wider discussion on the future of work and the impact of technological advancements on personal and professional paths tied to the meaning of life.

Practical implications can be foreseen in GAI applications designed to preserve the three dimensions of human creative expressions from automation, to safeguard them in integration and to enhance them in augmentation. Organizational awareness on such dimensions can be critical in timely addressing technological disruptions with the goal to build a people-centered organization, which is part of responsible management goals within a VUCA world. In such volatile and fast-pace changing landscape, resorting to universalistic ethical principles, which are drawn from confessional and non-confessional traditions, and have proven valuable in very different geographical and historical contexts, can be a crucial asset to confront new challenges.

The three above-mentioned discussed dimensions and related ethical guidelines can inform managerial decisions by eliciting bottom-up processes of creators’ engagement in assessing pros and cons of GAI adoption. Furthermore, they can guide internal processes of continuous feedbacks collection on GAI impacts on creativity, so to facilitate human-related processes of upskilling and reskilling of the workforce, as well as change to the design of the adopted technology. Such approach can yield positive outcomes in terms of ethical compliance beyond legal compliance, by favorably positioning the organization in front of audiences particularly keen on ethical AI adoption.

Safeguarding the three dimensions can also safeguard (or restore) trust in critically affected stakeholders by GAI introduction, by ensuring they feel valued and heard in their creative contribution, rather than replaced or disregarded in their fundamental creative needs. Leveraging on such dimensions can also inform process of human-machine integration, such as the one promoted by Universal Music in its developing of a new GAI music software, in close collaboration with musicians and artists. The latter can be instructed at the managerial level regardless of the organization’s size and specific industry, since ethical decision-making is based on previously built ethical awareness and stems from ethical judgment.

This work is subjected to the following limitations, which we believe can be overcome by future paths of research: it only focuses on tasks which are explicitly creative and of an artistic nature, while future paths of research are needed to assess tasks which might be partially creative and partially not, so to assess GAI impact in that area. It focuses on a selected number of works by leading personalist thinkers; future paths of research can address more in-depth other personalist contributions, as well blending such traditions with other relevant ethical traditions.

This work focuses on the three main dimensions of human creative expression which have a direct moral connotation within personalism, leaving out other ethically relevant dimensions of human creativity and creative professionals’ work, such as its impact on society in democratic terms, its relation to social networks, relational capital and other here neglected dimensions. Further research is also needed to assess the changing landscape of organizational ethical responsibility towards GAI, in light of future policymakers’ introduction of additional legal requirements on GAI and creative work. We believe that future paths of research can address these limitations by including these variables in further enquiries.

Lastly, being a normative work, this contribution can underpin future empirical research on how the enquired dimensions are hindered or enhanced by GAI use in relevant case study.

Funding Open access funding provided by FCT|FCCN (b-on).

Data Availability Not applicable.

Declarations

Competing Interests No competing interest to be reported.

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