On the Creative Battlefield: How Advertising Practitioners View Ethics in the GAI-Assisted Creative Process

This study explores how advertising practitioners incorporate Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) across the five stages of creative processes and how they navigate the ethical challenges that emerge. Drawing on in-depth interviews with agency and freelance professionals, the findings map GAI’s evolving roles onto a stage-based creative framework and identify the distinct tensions that arise at each phase. Beyond these task-level dilemmas, practitioners construed GAI ethics narrowly as minimal compliance, often delegating responsibility to others as efficiency norms and technological awe overshadowed concerns about data governance, bias, and labor. The study contributes a stage-specific framework of GAI-assisted creativity, clarifies how ethical responsibility is constructed within human-GAI collaboration, and offers actionable guidance.