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Call For Creative AI 2026

Title: NeurIPS Creative AI Track 2026: Agency

 

In its fourth year, and following previous years success, NeurIPS 2026 Creative AI Track invites research papers and artworks that explore emerging applications, methods, and critiques of artificial intelligence and machine learning in art, design, and creative practice.

Credit: Surface Tension (2025 by Karyn Nakamura), image courtesy of the artist

Focusing on the theme of Agency, this year’s track asks: how agency emerges, is exercised, is negotiated, and is contested through creative practice with AI. Agency may belong to an artist, a collaborator, a model, an audience, a platform, a community, or even a larger social and technical system, and may be asserted, delegated, shared, resisted, constrained, or redistributed. We welcome submissions from artists, designers, creatives, researchers, and critical thinkers that question and explore, for example:

  • How does AI change where creative agency begins, where it ends, and how it is recognized? How much initiative should creative systems have, and who gets to decide where that threshold lies?
  • Who is accountable when agency is distributed across artists, models, datasets, tools, and institutions? What kinds of responsibility remain human, even in highly automated creative systems?
  • What is the difference between a creative system enabling creativity and steering it? Who gains agency through AI-based creative systems, and whose agency may be diminished, absorbed, automated, or pre-structured?
  • What kinds of agency become imaginable only through artistic experiment? Can creative practice invent forms of agency that are distributed, unstable, or deliberately unresolved?
  • What happens to agency when AI enters live, embodied, or performative creative contexts? How is agency negotiated between bodies, interfaces, sensors, models, and audiences in real time?
  • How do friction, slowness, refusal, repetition, constraint, or failure preserve or transform creative agency? How do artists maintain intention when systems favor speed, novelty, and abundance?
  • What happens to taste when systems can simulate or predict aesthetic preference? How do artists assert judgment in environments optimized for abundance and variation?
  • Can an artwork reveal agencies that are hidden inside technical systems? What social assumptions should be embedded in systems so it will act helpfully, efficiently, or intelligently?

Submissions are not exclusively limited to the themes above, We welcome all forms of artwork and research that propose original ideas in Creative AI. We particularly encourage work that crosses disciplinary boundaries and may be critical, speculative, poetic, performative, empirical, technical, or experimental.

We hope the flexibility of formats including both artworks and research papers, as well as the on-site gathering at NeurIPS, will provide a forum for a diversity of voices and lead to engaging discussions that will benefit our community.

 

Important Dates:

  • June 30: Submission Portal Opens
  • August 3 (Anywhere on earth): Submission Deadline 
  • September 18: Decision 
  • October 23: Final Camera-Ready Submission 

 

Call for Papers and Artworks

 

Papers

 

We invite submissions for research papers that propose original ideas or novel uses of AI and ML for creativity. Submissions are encouraged to connect their contributions to creative practice. The topics of research papers are not restricted to the theme of Agency.  Please note that this year the Creative AI track papers will be presented onsite as posters that are separated from the main conference, and will not be included in the main conference proceedings. 

To submit: Papers should be 2-6 pages long without references. For formatting please use the paper template. The submission portal will open in July.

 

Artworks

 

We invite the submission of creative work that showcases innovative use of AI and ML. We encourage authors to consider the theme of Agency in their work.  We invite submissions in all areas of creativity including visual art, music, performing art, film, design, architecture, installations and more in the format of video recording.  

NeurIPS is a prestigious AI/ML conference that tens of thousands researchers from academia and industry attend every year. Selected works at the Creative AI track will be presented on large display screens at the conference and the authors will have the opportunity to interact with the NeurIPS research community to germinate more collaborative ideas.

To submit:  We invite authors to submit their work. An artwork submission requires the following:

  • Description (maximum 3 pages in PDF) (For formatting please use the paper template.)
    • Description of the work and the roles of AI and ML 
    • Description on how the theme of Agency is addressed
    • Short biography of all authors including reference to relevant prior works. 
  • Thumbnail image of the work (<100MB)
  • 3-min video preview of the work (<100MB) 

 

Policy

 

Single-blind review policy

The names of the authors should be included in the submission. 

 

Conference and Presentation Policy

For this track, the presentations will take place only at the main conference site in Sydney, Australia. If a work is accepted, at least one author must register for the conference to attend it in person. For registration policy and registration fee information, visit https://nips.cc/Conferences/2026 . The details regarding attending will be available soon.

 

Contact 

To stay up-to-date with all future announcements, please join our mailing list creativeaiml@googlegroups.com

For other inquiries, please contact creative-ai-chairs@neurips.cc.