Author: Aisya SabiliEditor: Ayom Mratita Purbandani

Introduction

Generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) has altered the conditions of artistic production with a speed that has outpaced our ability to decide what creation now means. Tech corporations often present this transformation as an expansion of creative agency, one in which the hand, camera, studio, and other embodied practices are increasingly mediated by prompts, models, and automated workflows.[1][2][3]

Read alongside posthumanist debates on the decentering of the human, this rhetoric can appear to promise a break from anthropocentric assumptions about art. This does not mean that the posthuman should be understood as the absence or replacement of the human, but as a challenge to the idea that human intention alone stands at the center of creative meaning. Creativity is no longer imagined solely as the expression of an individual consciousness, but as something produced through relations among bodies, technologies, datasets, institutions, and labor. Yet, this promise deserves closer scrutiny. What is celebrated as a movement beyond human exceptionalism may also intensify a distinctly human fantasy, namely the corporate desire to reproduce culture without the friction of lived experience, vulnerability, and labor.

AI as the Posthuman Artist: It’s Talking Through Your Hat

The commercial myth of the autonomous machine found one of its most visible moments with the auction of the ‘Portrait of Edmond Belamy’ where a work generated by code was sold for nearly half a million dollars under the guise of solo authorship.[4] This event successfully marketed the illusion of an independent creative spirit while conveniently obscuring the human infrastructure that made it possible. When we apply a critical framework that evaluates autonomy, authenticity, authorship, and intention (AAAI), the facade of the post-human artist begins to crumble.[5] The machine relies entirely on the collective labor of programmers and the uncompensated works of human artists whose lives were harvested to feed the algorithm.[6]

It is often argued that human creativity is also a form of algorithmic processing because our minds are fed by the works of others, yet this comparison ignores the fundamental role of lived experience and vulnerability. While both humans and machines receive input, humans mix their mental and creative labor with a sense of personal stake and ethical responsibility that a machine cannot replicate.[7] Human learning is grounded in social norms of inspiration and consent, to be fed by the culture of others is a process of situated growth. For a machine, it is a frictionless calculation that lacks the sense of historical and physical presence.[8] Moreover, it operates through a regime of data colonialism that with its scale and speed treats human expression as a raw resource to be extracted, stripped from its context, and repurposed for capital interest without consent or proper acknowledgement.[9][10] This may come off as a sign of structural perversion that replaces a living dialogue with a predatory regime of cultural theft.

This distinction is further suggested, although not fully settled, by studies of how humans perceive agency and intentionality in artificial agents. While a generative system may possess a form of organizational autonomy, it is entirely devoid of intentional autonomy because it has no conscious will or desire to communicate an experience.[11] Neuroscientific evidence shows that when we interact with other humans, our brains engage in a process called mentalizing to understand the thoughts and feelings behind an action.[12]

However, when we encounter artificial agents, the brain areas responsible for this deep social connection remain less active, suggesting that we instinctively recognize the hollow space where a “soul” should be.[13] This does not mean that AI generated images cannot move us nor that machine assisted works should be dismissed in advance. It means that the feeling of agency attached to a work cannot be separated from how viewers imagine intention, responsibility, and presence behind it. Because AI cannot judge the value of its own discovery or feel the motivation to create, it remains a “playmate” without a mind rather than a true creative actor.[14]

The Loss of Whimsy

Whimsy is the vital friction that distinguishes organic creation from algorithmic output. Far from being a mere aesthetic preference, whimsy is actually a sign of an embodied agent working through the unpredictable pressures of material reality. While generative systems are built on “mathematical art,” they are fundamentally designed to avoid unpredictability by calculating the most probable statistical path. They may produce surprising results, but their surprise still emerges from probabilistic variation rather than from a body struggling with a medium, a memory, or a world that pushes back.

This makes AI art an exercise in probability rather than a venture into the unknown because the machine is optimized to eliminate the very deviations that give art its human weight.[15] Even if we perceive the prompter as an artist who navigates these systems with deep feeling, there remains an unbridgeable gap between the logic of the algorithmic code and the sensory reality of human life. An algorithm may perfectly replicate the digital data of the ocean’s ultramarine blue through alphanumeric strings and a hex code like #120a8f, but it possesses no capacity to inhabit the true feeling of being in love and deep grief at the same time while watching it.

This sensory disconnection means that the numbers within the code possess no existential context as they can only mimic the formal properties of beauty without participating in the vulnerability that grounded the original inspiration. In a human process, whimsy is an emergent property of the artistic journey that is born from the hesitation, fatigue, and accidental discoveries that happen when a mind grapples with a medium. When creativity is abstracted into a curated digital commodity, this personal journey is bypassed in favor of a frictionless transaction, ensuing in polished pieces but fundamentally detached.[16] The danger here is not that a machine might produce a beautiful image, but that the entire creative process is being commodified into a series of transactional prompts that prioritize the final product over the act of making.

Therefore, with all seriousness, we must also resist the urge to simply delegitimize AI as not real art because such a stance is prone to overlooking the profound structural crisis it imposes on creative labor.[17] The result now is the growth of an alienation where we are surrounded by images that possess the perfection of art while lacking the essential whimsy that connects a work to the specific, messy conditions of its making.[18] Even when a human attempts to use these tools for expression, the medium itself imposes a “predictive” limit on their imagination, nudging the output toward what the algorithm deems statistically successful. This does not erase the agency of the human user, but it does show how that agency is mediated by systems designed to optimize pattern, speed, and marketable coherence.

The Extraction Behind the Screen

This discussion is worth revisiting because posthuman readings of AI art often imagine creativity beyond human-centered authorship, framing artistic production as an entangled process among humans, machines, nonhuman agencies, datasets, and environments.[19][20] In this sense, AI art is sometimes celebrated because it appears to unsettle the fantasy that the human artist is the only possible origin of meaning. Yet this promise becomes contradictory when placed beside the material conditions of today’s generative systems. If posthumanism asks us to decenter human privilege and think more carefully about the relations that sustain life, then the corporate expansion of generative AI does the opposite. It turns creativity into a convenience machine built on extractive infrastructures of energy, water, minerals, land, and cultural labor. This creates a fallback of anthropocentrism[21], in which human convenience is prioritized again.

The AI server farms required to maintain this level of output consume up to 1.125 million cubic meters of fresh water every year[22] and a single search powered by generative AI uses four to five times more energy than a traditional web query.[23] This is not post-humanism but a hyper-anthropocentric ego trip that burns real forests to produce digital ones.[24]

Just as the earth is mined for minerals to build processors, cultural archives are mined to train algorithms, usually without meaningful consent, compensation, or acknowledgement from the communities and creators whose works make those systems possible.[25] These extractive actions made fuels for a machine that is owned by just a handful of massive corporations. This is why the claim of moving beyond the human remains deeply conflicted because the system is entirely dependent on the exploitation of both human labor and the material world.[26] [27]

Conclusion

The debate should move past simple questions of utility or creativity as it revealed a structural shift toward a culture of ambiguity that primarily serves the survival of the capital system. Generative models do not axiomatically represent a post-human era. Instead, it functions as a technological loop that always returns to the human labor and data harvested for profit. By presenting the machine as an independent creator, the industry hides the dense relations that make such systems possible.[28] What appears as machine autonomy is built through human work, technical infrastructure, training data, ownership, and environmental cost. This rhetoric acts as a convenient screen for a massive data heist where our shared history is mined and sold back to us as a commodity.[29]

We must remember that while the definition of art is broad and subjective, it should not be simplified of the relations that give it meaning. Art is not simply the production of an object that can be seen, circulated, or consumed. It is a redirection of experience through judgment, vulnerability, memory, and critical awareness. This does not mean that artists create from a pure human origin untouched by tools, archives, machines, or nonhuman forces. Artistic practice has always been entangled with materials, technologies, references, accidents, and forms of collaboration beyond the individual self. Yet entanglement does not make responsibility disappear. It makes responsibility more urgent. The future of art remains deeply human, and not because the human stands alone at its center, but because meaning still depends on accountable relations.

1. Adobe, 2026. Firefly AI Assistant overview. Available at: https://helpx.adobe.com/firefly/web/firefly-ai-assistant/firefly-ai-assistant-overview.html [Accessed 15 June 2026]. ↑
2. Germanidis, A., 2023. Gen-2: Generate novel videos with text, images or video clips. Runway Research. Available at: https://runwayml.com/research/gen-2 [Accessed 15 June 2026]. ↑
3. OpenAI, n.d. DALL·E 2. Available at: https://openai.com/id-ID/index/dall-e-2/ [Accessed 15 June 2026]. ↑
4. McCormack, J., Gifford, T. & Hutchings, P. (2019) ‘Autonomy, Authenticity, Authorship and Intention in computer generated art’, EvoMUSART 2019: 8th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design, Leipzig, Germany. ↑
5. Ibid. ↑
6. Goetze, T. S. (2024) ‘AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation: Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks’, Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pp. 1-18. ↑
7. Ibid. ↑
8. Kalpokas, I. (2025) ‘Work of art in the Age of Its AI Reproduction’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 51(8), pp. 1268–1286. ↑
9. Zylinska, J. (2020) AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams, London: Open Humanities Press. ↑
10. Goetze, T. S. (2024) ‘AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation: Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks’, Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pp. 1-18. ↑
11. McCormack, J., Gifford, T. & Hutchings, P. (2019) ‘Autonomy, Authenticity, Authorship and Intention in computer generated art’, EvoMUSART 2019: 8th International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design, Leipzig, Germany. ↑
12. Vaitonytė, J., Alimardani, M. & Louwerse, M. M. (2023) ‘Scoping review of the neural evidence on the uncanny valley’, Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 9, 100263. ↑
13. Ibid. ↑
14. Wingström, R., Hautala, J. & Lundman, R. (2024) ‘Redefining Creativity in the Era of AI? Perspectives of Computer Scientists and New Media Artists’, Creativity Research Journal, 36(2), pp. 177-193. ↑
15. Ibid. ↑
16. Goetze, T. S. (2024) ‘AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation: Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks’, Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pp. 1-18. ↑
17. Ibid. ↑
18. Dalsgaard, P. (2025) ‘GenAI and the Crisis of Creative Labor: Automation, Augmentation, and the Artist’s Role’, Adjunct proceedings of the sixth decennial Aarhus conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR Adjunct 2025), Aarhus, Denmark. ↑
19. Bauman, P., 2025. ‘Post(human)-AI Art’, Le Random, 4 August ↑
20. Dao, L., 2023. ‘Posthuman Narratives: Artistic Experiments in Human-AI Co-Creation’, Journal of the Synergy of Creative Arts and Digital Design, 1(2), pp. 30–39. ↑
21. Cadman, S., Tanner, C. and Pang, P.C.I., 2025. ‘Humanism strikes back? A posthumanist reckoning with “self-development” and generative AI’, AI & Society, 40, pp. 6165–6180. ↑
22. Xiao, T., Fuso Nerini, F., Matthews, H. D., Tavoni, M. & You, F. (2025) ‘Environmental impact and net-zero pathways for sustainable artificial intelligence servers in the USA’, Nature Sustainability. ↑
23. Crawford, K. (2024) ‘Generative AI is guzzling water and energy’, Nature. ↑
24. Xu, C. & Ge, X. (2024) ‘AI as a Child of Mother Earth: Regrounding Human-AI Interaction in Ecological Thinking’, Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’24), Honolulu, HI, USA. ↑
25. Goetze, T. S. (2024) ‘AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation: Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks’, Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pp. 1-18. ↑
26. Zylinska, J. (2020) AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams, London: Open Humanities Press. ↑
27. Crawford, K. (2024) ‘Generative AI is guzzling water and energy’, Nature. ↑
28. Goetze, T. S. (2024) ‘AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation: Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks’, Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pp. 1-18. ↑
29. Kalpokas, I. (2025) ‘Work of art in the Age of Its AI Reproduction’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 51(8), pp. 1268–1286. ↑