Art and Authorship in the AI Spring: A Media-Philosophical Approach

Following the release of ChatGPT, public fascination with the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has drastically intensified, stimulating an unprecedented rise in the financing, development and deployment of AI technologies across society. However, the current hype around AI also presents uncomfortable questions about the role of human agency in culture, particularly in practices of art and communications where the arrival of convincing AI-generated media has raised the prospect that human authors and artists may be sidelined or replaced. "Art and Authorship in the AI Spring" takes a step back from the modern situation to, instead, focus on the decade preceding the release of ChatGPT when our current understanding of AI was only beginning to take form. During this brief period of rapid technological development, many artists were already experimenting with emerging AI technologies as a means of probing traditional notions of authorship from the production of AI-generated paintings, poetry and films to more experimental practices utilizing deepfake techniques, biometric recognition systems and large language models. By critically analysing various instances of AI-generated art and media during this period, "Art and Authorship in the AI Spring" explores this central question of authorship through the unique and often overlooked media philosophy of Vilém Flusser that looks beyond aesthetics to instead consider the technical conditions of AI technology itself. In reconsidering this recent history of AI-generated media from this perspective, this book aims to shed new light on significant ongoing debates around the societal impacts of AI technologies today.

"We urgently need more interventions like McIntyre's that remind us of the short yet already strangely forgotten history of generative AI amid today's relentless hype. This book recovers the past decade of developments that too often vanish from public debate, to understand where we are and how we got here. It resists narrowing the ethical frame of generative AI to solely legal terms, instead opening up its wider societal and philosophical implications. We can all learn from McIntyre's creative conceptualisations, such as "weird media", to better understand how generative AI reshapes authorship, creativity and our cultural consumption and production."

- Tobias Blanke, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Humanities, University of Amsterdam