Past Event • Panel Discussion
Silicon Over Soul: The Dangers of AI on Human Creativity
Wednesday 20 August 2025 • The Precinct, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane • Hosted by Responsible AI Australia
On Wednesday 20 August 2025, Silicon Over Soul: The Dangers of AI on Human Creativity drew artists, designers, lawyers and technologists to The Precinct for a panel discussion about what creativity means when AI systems can generate text, image, music and design at industrial scale.
The event was hosted by Responsible AI Australia and brought three perspectives onto the same stage, deliberately chosen to surface the points where legal, creative and technology views diverge.
The panel
Peter Bolam
LLM (IP), Senior Lawyer
Copyright, authorship and intellectual property considerations in the age of generative AI.
Katherine Widomski Mohn
General Manager, QuantumBlu
Commercial creative work, marketing intelligence and the practical use of AI tools in client facing creative output.
Jamie van Leeuwen
Founder, Absolutely Ai
Building AI products with creative communities in mind, and what responsible design looks like at the product level.
The conversation in the room
Topics ranged from how copyright law currently treats AI assisted versus AI generated work, through to whether human creativity is genuinely threatened by generative systems or simply being repositioned. The panel took questions from the audience throughout, including a recurring concern from working creatives about how their existing portfolios are being absorbed into model training sets and what protection is realistically available.
Other threads picked up through the night included attribution standards for AI assisted work, the economics of creative labour when generation cost falls toward zero, and how AI product designers can choose to respect creative communities rather than extract from them.
Why this conversation matters
The evening reinforced a position that Responsible AI Australia has held since its founding. The intersection of AI and human creativity is one of the more consequential issues facing the next decade, and resolving it well requires legal, creative and technology perspectives in the same room. That is what the night was designed to do, and the conversations among attendees afterward suggested it landed.
Thank you to Peter Bolam, Katherine Widomski Mohn and Jamie van Leeuwen for sharing their expertise, and to everyone who joined on the night.
From the night
