Artificial intelligence anxiety among creative professionals: Evidence from the Brazilian creative economy

This study examines the dimensional structure of Artificial Intelligence Anxiety among Brazilian creative professionals through a cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the Artificial Intelligence Anxiety Scale (AIAS). While the original four-factor structure of the scale—Learning, Job Replacement, AI Configuration, and Sociotechnical Blindness—is broadly replicated, findings from EFA and CFA revealed recurring patterns of greater empirical overlap between factors, lower compartmentalization among anxiety dimensions, and atypical psychometric behavior in specific items when compared to the original validation study. Furthermore, subgroup analyses demonstrate that learning-related anxiety is higher among younger professionals, suggesting that support needs may vary across career stages. These findings are consistent with the proposition that creative workers experience AI anxiety differently from the general-population samples originally used to validate the AIAS. Theoretically, these results extend the AIAS literature to a professional population whose identity is closely tied to authorship and originality, yet whose AI-related anxiety remains empirically understudied. Practically, the findings suggest that managerial responses centered exclusively on technical upskilling may be insufficient to address concerns — such as those tied to human-machine similarity and occupational replacement — that appear to co-occur among creative professionals.