Artificial Intelligence in Creative Industries: Advances Prior to 2025

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in generative AI and large language models (LLMs), have profoundly impacted the creative industries, enabling more innovative content creation, enhancing workflows, and democratizing access to creative tools. This paper explores these technological shifts, with particular focus on how those that have emerged since our previous review in 2022 have expanded creative opportunities and improved efficiency. These technological advancements have enhanced the capabilities of text-to-image, text-to-video, and multimodal generation technologies. In particular, key breakthroughs in LLMs have established new benchmarks in conversational AI, while advancements in image generators have revolutionized content creation. We also discuss the integration of AI into post-production workflows, which has significantly accelerated and improved traditional processes. Once content has been created, it must be delivered to its audiences; the media industry is now facing the demands of increased communication traffic due to creative content. We therefore include a discussion of how AI is beginning to transform the way we represent and compress media content. We highlight the trend toward unified AI frameworks capable of addressing and integrating multiple creative tasks, and we underscore the importance of human insight to drive the creative process and oversight to mitigate AI-generated inaccuracies. Finally, we explore AI's future potential in the creative sector, stressing the need to navigate emerging challenges and to maximize its benefits while addressing the associated risks.