Artificial Intelligence and the Changing Concept of Artistic Authorship

Abstract

The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) image generators has introduced new questions concerning creativity, authorship, originality, and artistic agency. Traditional theories of art generally place the artist at the center of the creative process, regarding the artwork as an expression of individual intention, skill, imagination, or experience. Generative AI complicates this model because an AI-generated image may involve a human user, a computational model, a dataset, software developers, and numerous unacknowledged cultural sources. This paper examines how AI technologies are changing the concept of artistic authorship in contemporary art. It argues that AI does not simply replace the artist but transforms artistic practice into a more distributed process involving selection, prompting, editing, interpretation, and technological mediation. The paper also considers questions of originality, copyright, artistic labor, and aesthetic judgment. Rather than treating AI-generated art as either purely human or purely machine-made, the study proposes understanding it as a collaborative and technologically mediated form of cultural production.