Recent advancements in AI, are revealing several different ways that AI can be used in creative work. Given the emergence of AI in creative industries, management researchers have called for theories on working with AI and particularly on working with AI in creative work. To date, neither collaboration nor creativity theories account for the tensions that surface when employees are required to simultaneously produce novel ideas and incorporate AI feedback in creative tasks. To build theory on this timely and important dynamic, I conducted a nearly three-year longitudinal case study with fashion designers and stylists who work directly with an AI system that produces feedback for clothing designs and curated styling.

My findings reveal the uncharted, but very relevant, relationship that takes place between employees and AI and how employees manage collaborating with AI. This inductive study reveals the dynamic ways in which creatives first lean in to learn, disconnect to protect their work and creative identity, and finally reconcile ways to reconnect with AI for co-existence. This study extends research on collaboration showing that when individuals must balance independence with AI interactions, collaboration is neither a liner, nor a sequential process but rather, an iterative one, and it is through these multiple iterations that employee-AI collaboration improves.