Journal articleIssue 12025
Who is the Artist in the Age of AI? A Discussion on Creative Labor, Automation, and Knowledge Extractivism
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author
Jana Reske
abstract
This paper explores the developing relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and creativity, focusing on how generative tools such as Midjourney, ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion challenge traditional understandings of artistic production, authorship, and labor. Drawing on the relational-materialist framework developed by Celis Bueno, Chow, and Popowicz (2024) and grounded in Lievrouw's (2014) diagram of mediation, this paper examines the dynamic interactions between technological artifacts, creative practices, and social arrangements. Central to this analysis are the concepts of creative labor, automation, and distributed agency, which help to demonstrate how AI tools function not only as instruments but also as active agents in the creative process. While AI is often celebrated for democratizing creativity and enabling new forms of artistic expression, the paper highlights the ethical and economic concerns surrounding the commodification and automation of creative labor. The concept of “knowledge extractivism” (Pasquinelli and Joler 2021) is used to describe how AI systems are trained on vast datasets of human-generated content, often without consent or compensation, raising critical questions about ownership, distribution of value, and exploitation. In addition, the notion of “mean images” (Steyerl 2023) highlights how AI-generated outputs often reflect statistical averages rather than true innovation. By situating AI creativity within broader systems of data capitalism and epistemic colonialism, the paper challenges narratives of co-creation and calls for a more critical understanding of agency, authorship, and power in AI-driven cultural production. Ultimately, it argues that while AI can augment human creativity, it is not inherently creative. Instead, it functions by remixing and repurposing human labor, necessitating new regulatory frameworks and ethical considerations to ensure a fairer creative future.