NZ Creative AI Summit tackles AI's cultural risks

New Zealand's media and creative industry gathered for the NZ AI and Creativity Summit 2026, with BBC technology forecaster Laura Ellis, miso.ai's Lucky Gunasekara, and figures from TVNZ, Stuff and NZME debating AI's effect on journalism and original content. Only 17% of New Zealanders surveyed thought AI would make disinformation better, versus 53% who said worse. NZ Geographic publisher James Frankham argued that global LLMs have been "systematically scraping" New Zealand's knowledge culture and reselling it back as a subscription, framing it as a form of cultural colonisation - pointing to NZGeo.com's robots.txt blocking major AI crawlers as a direct response. An interactive "Meatworld vs Bitworld" session explored where human and AI creativity diverge. For NZ's XR and immersive sector, where AI-assisted 3D and virtual production tools are increasingly part of the pipeline, the summit's throughline was blunt: commodity AI content is being priced down, while genuinely original, distinctive work - the kind local XR studios trade in - is being priced up.