Glasgow’s reworked Fusion Fest placed the relationship between technology and creativity at the centre of its 2026 programme, attempting to reconcile the tension between between AI and art as the former encroaches ever further on creative endeavour.

But, is framing the issue as an encroachment a trite, reductive take? Is AI democratising creative onus – allowing sweeping visions to come to life, lynchpinned by personal human endeavour and given form by tools that would previously be out-of-reach to budding creatives?

Or, is it compressing years of craft, practice, experimentation and creative development into systems trained on the work of others, making it easier to replicate the outputs of that labour without necessarily sharing its value (or understanding the original artist’s intentions) with the people who helped make those capabilities possible?

Wherever you stand on it, the fact that this is one of key questions posed on the day illustrates that Fusion Fest returned to Glasgow this week as a markedly different proposition from the technology conference from which it evolved.

Hosted at The Briggait on Thursday as the headline event of Glasgow Tech Week, the half-day programme brought together artists, designers, technologists, entrepreneurs and researchers for a mix of talks, performances, installations and demonstrations spanning AI, immersive storytelling, digital design, gaming and music.

It’s an ambitiously diverse mix of offerings and perspectives that the event has been edging towards gradually over the last few years.

Glasgow City Innovation District retired the Glasgow Tech Fest name after its 2024 edition, relaunching the event as Fusion Fest in 2025 with the stated aim of expanding beyond the technology sector and engaging the city’s tech, digital, creative and innovation communities.

But last year’s inaugural Fusion Fest still looked, structurally, much like a conventional business and technology conference. 

Held over a full day at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre, the programme featured senior figures from WIRED, IBM, JPMorganChase, Barclays and Skyscanner alongside founder stories, business panels, networking sessions and an exhibitor showcase.

The 2026 edition represented a much more complete break with that format.

Delivered in partnership with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow School of Art and the University of Strathclyde, Fusion Fest described itself as a “crossover event”, with its programme organised around the themes of Flow, Expand and Amplify.

Its choice of subject matter also reflected a conscious attempt to bring two communities into closer conversation.

A keynote session between artist and filmmaker Rachel Maclean and Aintools CTO Dr Ana Rojo-Echeburúa focused explicitly on the need for collaboration between the creative and technology sectors, the barriers separating them and how those barriers might be overcome. Elsewhere, live demonstrations ranged from AI research tools and augmented reality to VR, digital accessibility and immersive art.

That conversation feels particularly relevant in 2026.

AI has intensified longstanding questions around authorship, intellectual property, automation, the economic value of creative work, and who has the right to steward that value. Rather than positioning creativity as another industry to which technology can simply be applied, Fusion Fest appeared designed to put both communities on more equal footing and explore what each might offer the other.

While it’s refreshing to see incredibly talented artists and entrepreneurs showcase how they’re using the technology to augment their endeavours, there are still plenty of uncomfortable questions left on the table.

Creative work has always been iterative. Artists borrow, reinterpret, remix and build on what came before them. Inspiration rarely emerges in a vacuum and we can all accept that. But does that same logic translate neatly to gen AI when the tools themselves are largely proprietary, their inner workings opaque, and the economic value they create increasingly concentrated among a relatively small number of enormously well-capitalised companies? There’s a real tension there that needs to be hashed out.

There is also the thornier question of monetisation. If an artist produces commercially valuable work using systems whose capabilities have, in part, been shaped by vast quantities of other people’s creative output (in a more quantifiable manner than simply being inspired by it), where does influence end and extraction begin? And who ultimately benefits most from that arrangement?

This last point was touched on by Alex Reedijk, General Director of Scottish Opera, during a Q&A with independent artist and filmmaker Rachel Maclean.

Maclean acknowledged the issue, but argued that she does not really believe in copyright as a concept – that attempting to own creativity and rigidly assign value to creative output can ultimately become self-defeating.

It’s an admirable stance (for the very aspirational, at least) that admittedly, deserves a whole lot more unpacking and nuance – and probing/challenging – than a single question in a Q&A could ever allow for.

On the face of it though when it comes to gen AI is whether the companies building the technology will adopt that same philosophy in the other direction. As OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and a small number of other firms gain an increasingly significant stake in how creative work is produced, distributed and monetised, will they be equally relaxed about ownership, attribution and value when the creative output in question is generated through their platforms?

That tension feels increasingly difficult to ignore. Once the box is open and the models have absorbed your work, there is no meaningful way to claw it back – and for individual creatives, challenging some of the most powerful technology companies in the world through the courts is hardly an even fight.

I certainly can’t claim to understand the experience of creatives in anything approaching its full complexity. But perhaps the simplest question is also the most important: are artists – in the broadest possible sense – actually better off now than they were before generative AI became ubiquitous? And is the future looking brighter or bleaker for them? 

Lessons From the Alchemists

While the first two-thirds of Fusion Fest were deliberately exploratory, offering some genuinely inspiring demonstrations of where technology and creative practice might be heading, Amplify: 5 Things – The Alchemists grounded the day with something more practical.

Bringing together founders and creatives from very different backgrounds, the session shifted the focus from what might come next to the experiences that had already shaped some fantastic stories of entrepreneurship, leadership, journeys and values.

Hosted by 5Things founder Andy Irvine, the session asked experienced figures working across the technology and creative industries to distill the lessons that had shaped their careers.

For Lumino co-founder and CEO Becky Cotton, entrepreneurship was not the career she originally expected.

Before establishing the digital therapeutics company, Cotton spent around 15 years working in public policy, including as Director of Mental Health Policy at the NHS Confederation. By 2019, however, she found herself both burnt out and bored.

After taking time away from work, the arrival of Covid disrupted many of the conventional career options she might otherwise have pursued. Instead of asking what job she should take next, Cotton began asking herself: “What ideas have I never had the time to explore?”

That experience informed the first of her five lessons: “Get comfortable with uncertainty.”

Values were another recurring theme across all the speakers. Cotton recalled an opportunity for Lumino to take significant investment from US backers, which the company ultimately rejected because accepting it would have pushed the business in a direction its founders did not want to pursue.

“You often know something is only really a value when it costs you something,” she said.

Cotton also emphasised the importance of humility, particularly when working across disciplines.

Lumino brings together expertise from gynaecologists, GPs and psychologists through to software engineers, filmmakers and regulatory specialists, and Cotton argued that tackling complicated problems requires leaders to recognise the limits of their own knowledge.

Cotton drew a firm distinction between humility and the tendency to locate structural problems within individuals.

Taking aim at the language of “imposter syndrome”, particularly around female founders, Cotton argued that encouraging women simply to become more confident risks obscuring inequalities around investment, opportunity and representation.

Her lesson was instead to “not mistake a broken system for a broken self”.

Pauline McCloy-Turtle, Creative Director at SUUM.studio, approached the same exercise from more than two decades spent moving between design, digital, immersive and broadcast work.

After graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, McCloy-Turtle spent time travelling before returning to Scotland, where she struggled to find a creative community that resonated with her.

Alongside friends from art school, she rented a shop in Partick and turned it into a studio, creating work with limited resources before attracting attention from the Lighthouse and international design events.

The venture itself eventually ended, but the contacts and opportunities it created continued to shape the work that followed.

For McCloy-Turtle, the lesson was that creatives should think not only about the work they want to make, but the conditions needed to make it.

She reduced that idea to three questions: “What work do I want to make? Who do I want to make it with? How are we going to get there?”

Another lesson was simpler: “Stay weird.”

Over the years, McCloy-Turtle has variously been described as an artist, designer, producer, director and businessperson. Rather than viewing that breadth as a lack of specialisation, she argued that moving between disciplines can reveal connections that would otherwise be missed.

That philosophy is reflected in SUUM.studio’s own work, which has ranged from immersive art and electronic music events to Save the Rave, a virtual music venue built inside Fortnite.

Perhaps fittingly for an event examining the relationship between creativity and technology, one of her strongest observations was about knowing when to step away from screens altogether.

“We need to try and cultivate taste off of screens,” she said.

Despite spending much of her professional life around digital media, McCloy-Turtle spoke about the importance of swimming, walking, making physical things and spending time among communities beyond her immediate professional circle.

“Our tastes, we have to feed them really deliberately,” she said, warning against allowing creative instincts to be shaped entirely by material selected by algorithms – which already has a predisposition to certain things that you will likely enjoy, closing the door to something perhaps entirely new to you.

McCloy-Turtle also stressed the importance of opening doors for others, recalling the people who had supported her at different stages of her own career and the opportunities those relationships had created.

“Careers aren’t built on business cards, they’re built on relationships, and they should be reciprocal,” she said.

Her final lesson concerned knowing when to say no.

Recalling periods when she had taken on too many projects simultaneously, McCloy-Turtle said she had learned to distinguish between being capable of doing something and actually having the capacity to do it.

“I confuse capability with capacity,” she said.

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The session’s final speaker, electronic music producer, engineer and educator Simon Stokes, brought another perspective from a career spanning music, teaching and entrepreneurship.

Stokes described a journey that began with making and sharing music online, performing live and teaching music production one-to-one, gradually building a career around interests he had been developing since childhood.

One of the ideas he returned to was the value of simply getting started.

“To take messy action is just to get started,” Stokes said, arguing that progress often means being prepared to fail while still aiming to succeed.

It was a fitting contribution to a session in which none of the speakers presented their careers as particularly linear or carefully mapped out in advance.

Taken together, Cotton, McCloy-Turtle and Stokes offered a neat reflection of Fusion Fest itself.

Each has moved between disciplines, roles and professional identities, with careers shaped as much by experimentation and unexpected turns as by deliberate planning.

That movement between disciplines is increasingly what Fusion Fest appears to be trying to encourage at an institutional level.

The relationship between technology and the creative industries is unlikely to become less complicated as AI capabilities continue to advance, and an afternoon of talks and installations was never going to resolve the tensions surrounding them.

But, in moving further away from the conventional tech conference model it inherited, Fusion Fest 2026 at least offered a space in which those tensions –  and the opportunities that sit alongside them – could be examined by both sides of the conversation.