Endless Artists: Meaning, Authorship, and Ownership in the Generative AI Era

At the cutting edge of public discourse around generative AI's infancy resides a tangled mess of questions around what it means to be an artist or author and how we value creative work in today's society.

Mired in complex theories about arts production, questions about AI-generated content often fail to clarify AI's implications about who we regard to be an artist; who owns the processes and products of an artist's work; and how this effects the relationship between art and public culture. Exploring how concepts of artistic creation and authorship are affected when artificial intelligence sources and creates content, Endless Artists equips readers to engage in cultural discourse without succumbing to uninformed misconceptions about AI.
The book has two main sections, each of which comprises a group of perspectives on AI meant to offer opportunity for critical questioning rather than definitive conclusions. Using post-humanist scholarship, Ryan Prewitt and K. Wilson unpack common arguments about the dangers of generative AI, revealing the often-unsupported assumptions about art, authorship, the production of meaning, and who owns them implicit in each. The authors then build stronger alternative arguments against AI as it is administered today, drawing upon a range of philosophical approaches and pointing to generative AI's institutional enmeshments to elucidate AI's sinister aspects and consequences.