Artificial Intelligence & Creative Integrity
Technology should support creativity — not replace it.
Circle & Star is a venue built by and for artists — performers, musicians, writers, designers, photographers, filmmakers, and the craftspeople whose fingerprint is on everything an audience feels but can’t name. Our concern has never been with AI as a tool. It is with the replacement of human creative practice.
There is room for AI. It is an exciting new tool. We need to use it responsibly — and collectively set the standards.
At a glance
We welcome AI as a tool inside a human-led process
- Editing, retouching, compositing, restoration, upscaling, content-aware fill
- Research, copy refinement, and visual experimentation
- AI built into professional software — Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, Firefly
We won’t ordinarily use work that is primarily AI-generated
- Posters, key art, publicity photography and marketing where the principal creative contribution came from a text prompt
- Anything presented as finished, human-authored work when it isn’t
- Deepfakes, voice clones or prompt-made images of a real performer, without their consent
The distinction that matters
AI-assisted workflows are entirely acceptable where they form part of a wider process directed by a creative practitioner. The tool serves the maker. That is craft, and we support it.
What we set apart is the finished piece generated primarily from a prompt and presented as original creative work. Audiences are increasingly able to tell the difference, and they respond to authorship — to the sense that a real person made a deliberate choice. We would rather invest in the people who bring it.
There is a practical cost, too. Prompt-generated images tend to resist the ordinary demands of a professional workflow — reformatting, refinement, a small change of text — and often create more work rather than less. Original assets, made by someone who can adjust them, hold up.
The people on our stage
A performer’s face and voice are their living, and we treat them that way. When we make publicity from our own photography and film of a company — shoots, rehearsals, the production itself — we use the same professional tools as anyone: layouts, grading, retouching, montages and composites, and new elements made from those photographs in software such as Photoshop and Firefly. Every performer sees an image of themselves before we first publish it, and can ask us to leave it out.
Some things need a performer’s separate, specific consent, and we do not do them without it — an image or video of them made from a text prompt, words they did not say, a cloned or synthesised voice, or their likeness, voice or performance used to train an AI model or build a digital replica. The photograph starts with the person. So does everything we make from it.
What we ask
If you are bringing a show to Circle & Star, we ask that promotional and editorial materials originate from genuine human authorship. Commission a designer, a photographer, an illustrator. Use AI freely to sharpen and finish that work — but let the creative contribution be a person’s.
Where AI has played a significant role in an asset you’d like us to use, tell us. We’ll always talk it through rather than turn it away unseen — write to hello@circleandstar.com.
Our commitment
Circle & Star remains committed to investing in and showing the work of creative professionals — and to keeping artists at the centre of the cultural work we present. This is a new tool and a shared responsibility. We would rather help set the standard than pretend the question away.