Work Without Author, Art Without the Human?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an increasingly powerful artistic medium, but it is not new. As early as 1952, mathematician and computer scientist Christopher Strachey wrote a poem using a computer, “Hey Honey.” It was a creative collaboration between him and the Ferranti Mark I, and consisted of a combination of seventy preselected words that the computer then mixed into a surprisingly lyrical work. Was the computer the author of this piece? For Strachey, the answer was no. He felt that assembling words according to rules did not constitute authorship.

Although “art” and “artificial” are related terms, they have different connotations. The artificial tends to be viewed negatively, while things that are artistic are only appreciated if they appear to be made by humans, and if we can sense the maker’s hand within them. Yet historically, this distinction between artificial and artistic has never been as clear-cut as it may seem. Creativity has always been technically mediated, be it through new materials, tools, or media. AI only exacerbates this tension and makes it more visible, as it now enfolds even more layers into one medium: artist, structure, process, work, and, now also, corporations.

One thing is becoming increasingly clear: The emergence of AI demands a rethinking of creativity and the importance of the human “hand” or authorship. What is merely artificial, and what is already artistic? This debate has been around since the advent of photography in the late nineteenth century, and then was reignited with the rise of digital media and processes in art making. But will AI now seize the last bastion of authorship and degrade artists themselves to tools? Can AI now also create art?

So-called AI is neither artificial nor a technical term, but rather a narrative with many aspects that no one fully understands or sees. It often refers to technologies, algorithmic systems, machine learning, or neural networks, all of which are able to process an enormous amount of data. The problem is not so much the technology as such, but rather its (programmed) power, since AI makes opaque decisions—from music recommendations to discriminatory classifications.

Whatever artificial intelligence is or pretends to be, the concept officially appeared in the US in the early 1950s. It combined hope with fantasies of control, while also fueling the imaginations of investors and the dreams of the US Department of Defense, particularly its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA.

In contrast to predictive or analytical AI, generative AI (GenAI) generates new content more or less independently but based on human instructions. These AI systems can write texts, create images, or generate soundscapes. Many are now rightly concerned that this all-encompassing AI will displace human authors, especially in creative fields. The launch of DALL-E, one of the first image-generating AI programs to receive main-stream attention, already raised fears that generative models would change creative industries and exert pressure on artists, or even fully replace them. Although such predictions follow an economic logic that sees creativity as a replaceable activity, shifts are already taking place in some professional fields. The theft of data for the training of these new AI models alone has led many creatives and artists to despair.

What, then, could a new form of authorship look like in the age of AI, when humans and machines compete for the claim to artistic genius?

The figure of the “author,” in the sense of a creator, is a genius, at once a human being and a legend, rarely a woman. Artists are historically male. For decades after Ernst Gombrich published his still-influential book The Story of Art in 1950, the fact that it included practically no women was hardly commented upon. When asked about this later, Gombrich is said to have replied that not everyone could be a genius. It was not until the sixteenth edition that one woman was mentioned: Käthe Kollwitz. Women were apparently never geniuses. This logic reveals how strongly the concept of authorship is historically linked to societal power relations. In art history, men appear as authors and makers, while women often appear as muses and supporters. When art historian Katy Hessel wrote The Story of Art Without Men in 2022, she did so as an intervention into Gombrich’s work. In it, she points out—not for the first time—that women also made art, but they were not seen, collected, or canonized. Geniuses were never born—they were made.

At the end of the 1960s, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes explored the question of the author in depth. Barthes, in his essay “The Death of the Author,” emphasized the work itself, locating its meaning in its reception, structure, and context. Foucault’s lecture “What is an Author?,” meanwhile, examined the function of the author as a form of subjectivation. However, the often dramatized contrast between these two positions obscures the fact that neither fully advocated the abolition of authors nor their destabilization. Despite these theoretical provocations, the myth of the (male) author remains a surprisingly stable concept in our culture. The notion of the individual artistic genius continues to shape both the art world and the perception of art. Yet this association is increasingly being challenged—not only as a result of feminist critique, but also due to new technologies.

In a world with AI, art still only makes sense to us humans. For AI, art is utterly meaningless, lacking a function or aim. We, on the other hand, recognize ourselves in works of art and in the artistic process. This is where AI can provide a new purpose or meaning. It can prompt us to ask more questions—about who the art-making subject is, but also about its underlying aesthetic, social, economic, and technological power structures.

AI is increasingly shaping our world. This can make it more difficult to see, understand, or even criticize the social structures that may make existing inequalities visible or reinforce them. Artistic practices point out that the transformations of AI entail new forms of perception, possibilities for action, and (the lack of) freedom. AI may not be an author, but it allows us to find and negotiate new conceptions of authorship. In doing so, we can recognize new and networked forms of creativity that do not mean the end of human authors, but ideally enable and reveal new and multiple ones.

The issue here is less about a duel between humans and AI, and more about asking ourselves, Whose gesture is recognizable as art? How do we use AI without being used by it? AI will not replace human creative processes, meanings, or contexts. It is precisely where AI partially eludes our human experience that art can propose alternative worlds in which we can be thinking and acting authors, not merely data sets.