Conversations drifted through the space, mingling with the aroma of coffee and the hum of people moving between sessions. Inside the auditorium, attendees listened and debated, while outside, discussions spilled into the cafeteria and corridors. This was CultureCon 2026 at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA). The networking mixer brought together artistes and cultural practitioners. We caught up with Sanjoy Roy, Roshan Abbas, Karsh Kale and Jishnu Dasgupta to ask: what happens to creativity when technology changes the very act of creating?Ironically, patchy network connectivity offered an unexpected break from phones, drawing attention back to the stage. And the conversation there centred on a question that is becoming increasingly difficult for the creative world to ignore: when AI can generate images, music, text and video with increasing ease, what happens to originality, artistic labour and the human impulse to create?
Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Arts
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy: CultureCon
For Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Arts, this democratisation is not entirely new. According to him, technology has long lowered the barriers to creative participation. “The minute these phones came about, everything got democratised because you were taking photographs. This has made everybody a filmmaker. This has made everybody a creative artiste. This has made everybody a meme. This has made everybody an influencer.”But if technology can draw from everything that already exists, what happens to the artiste whose value lies in imagining something that does not? Roshan Abbas, a storyteller, media entrepreneur and creative industry leader, sees that distinction in originality. “I keep saying that art is created in the extraordinary, art is created in the flaw, art is created in the anomaly. So, AI, unfortunately, is aggregating what is already available. Art is about that which has never been seen,” he says.
