Generative artificial intelligence assistants like ChatGPT are cutting into traditional online search traffic, depriving news sites of visitors and impacting the advertising revenue they desperately need, in a crushing blow to an industry already fighting for survival. "The next three or four years will be incredibly challenging for publishers everywhere. No one is immune from the AI summaries storm gathering on the horizon," warned Matt Karolian, vice president of research and development at Boston Globe Media. "Publishers need to build their own shelters or risk being swept away."

A new class of tools, colloquially called generative AI, can produce high-quality artistic media for visual arts, concept art, music, fiction, literature, video, and animation. The generative capabilities of these tools are likely to fundamentally alter the creative processes by which creators formulate ideas and put them into production. As creativity is reimagined, so too may be many sectors of society. Understanding the impact of generative AI - and making policy decisions around it - requires new interdisciplinary scientific inquiry into culture, economics, law, algorithms, and the interaction of technology and creativity. We argue that generative AI is not the harbinger of art's demise, but rather is a new medium with its own distinct affordances. In this vein, we consider the impacts of this new medium on creators across four themes: aesthetics and culture, legal questions of ownership and credit, the future of creative work, and impacts on the contemporary media ecosystem. Across these themes, we highlight key research questions and directions to inform policy and beneficial uses of the technology.

Science fiction movies like "Blade Runner" and "The Terminator" have defined the perception of artificial intelligence within popular culture. For most people, the term AI conjures up images of a dystopian future dominated by humanoid robots that have taken over the world. This common conception leads to the dismissal of the technology as impossible, or at least faroff in the future. Few people realize that we are already delving into a world dominated by AI, and it's nothing like "The Terminator." The actual risks posed by artificial intelligence have nothing to do with killer robots; they relate to the machine-learning algorithms that recommend content on the internet.

Headlines from the likes of The New York Times ("Deepfakes Are Coming. We Can No Longer Believe What We See"), The Wall Street Journal ("Deepfake Videos Are Getting Real and That's a Problem"), and The Washington Post ("Top AI researchers race to detect'deepfake' videos: 'We are outgunned'") would have us believe that clever fakes may soon make it impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood. Deepfakes -- pieces of AI-synthesized image and video content persuasively depicting things that never happened -- are now a constant presence in conversations about the future of disinformation. These concerns have been kicked into even higher gear by the swiftly approaching 2020 U.S. election. A video essay from The Atlantic admonishes us: "Ahead of 2020, Beware the Deepfake."