CreaTech
Exploring how technologies can create new cultural experiences and redefine the media and creative industries landscape in collaboration with cultural partners, external organisations and communities.
The CreaTech Network Series
Key people: Professor Michelle Phillips, Creative Manchester Director, Professor Richard Kingston, Digital Futures Director
Duration: January 2024 – present
Funder: UKRI HEIF (Higher Education Innovation Funding)/UKRI RIF (Regional Innovation Funding)
CreaTech Network Series 2026
Podcast: The Ethics of AI in the Cultural and Creative Industries
This podcast series, presented with sister Platform, Digital Futures, was produced by Dr Riza Batista-Navarro, Creative Manchester's theme lead for Creative Industries and Innovation/CreaTech.
Over the course of multiple episodes host Duncan Hull and his guests explore the relationship between AI and creativity, while also discussing whether (or how) AI can be integrated into the cultural and creative industries in an ethical and responsible manner.
Episode One: Creative Ownership
The first episode features podcast host Duncan Hull and his guests Andrew Melchior, Honorary Professor of Computer Science, and Parvathy Nair, PhD researcher in Law.
This episode focuses on the topic of Creative Ownership, exploring whether and how creatives and artists can retain ownership of their work given the current AI landscape and regulations in place.
Andrew Melchior is a British-German creative technologist with over 25 years at the intersection of music, technology, and art. As CTO of Massive Attack and founder of Genotone Ltd, he has spent his career building the infrastructure that connects creative practice to emerging technology, from pioneering work on one of the world's first artist websites with David Bowie in 1999 to encoding Massive Attack's Mezzanine into synthetic DNA with ETH Zürich. He has been recently appointed as Honorary Professor at the Department of Computer Science.
Parvathy Nair is a PhD researcher in Law at the University of Manchester examining how European patent law addresses foundation AI models, with a focus on sufficiency of disclosure, competition policy, and open-source frameworks. Funded by an AHRC–UKRI Studentship, her research explores how the sufficiency of disclosure criteria under the European Patent Convention (EPC) is equipped to handle complex technologies like foundation AI models and how this requirement interacts with the transparency requirements under the EU Artificial Intelligence Act and the provisions of the Digital Markets Acts, in relation to training data accessibility.
Andrew visited The University of Manchester as part of a programme of activities organised by Creative Manchester in May 2026 and gave a keynote lecture titled "Proof of Human: AI, Copyright, and the Fight for Creative Authorship", which took place at Sister, Manchester's innovation district. In that talk, he presented a compelling case for strengthening creative authorship in the era of generative AI. The day after, he sat down with Parvathy and Duncan Hull (host) to discuss in further detail the opportunities and challenges that generative AI poses to the creative sector, including the reasons why current regulations cannot sufficiently protect creative ownership.