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, po