When Art Is No Longer Only Human

AI, Creativity, and the Dilemma of Authenticity

Artificial intelligence did not arrive like a guest we welcomed, but like smoke forcing its way under the door. We told ourselves it was still a curiosity confined to labs, but it was already sitting in the studio, stealing our gestures, learning our rhythms. Not a neutral tool, but a double - silent, hungry, insistent. A collaborator we never invited, yet one that now shapes what we dare to call “creation.”

It has already touched every corner of the creative field. Posters glowing with impossible hues, songs that feel like they were stolen from someone else’s dream, films assembled from words alone and projected as if memory itself had a new director. The spectacle dazzles - yes - but isn’t that always how domination begins? First it seduces, then it devours. What becomes of authenticity when authorship is no longer anchored to the body of the maker, but dissolves into the shimmer of code? Where, in this dazzling surface, is the pulse, the wound, the sweat?

When I look at an image born of a machine, I do not encounter another human presence. I encounter myself - my desires, my projections - reflected back, distorted and sharpened. It is a mirror that flatters and deceives at the same time. And I fear that in that sterile reflection, the essence of art - the trembling space where two subjectivities meet - simply disappears.

The first signs seemed harmless, almost like play. Edmond de Belamy, that spectral face painted by an algorithm in 2018, sold at Christie’s as if it were a relic from the future. Deep Dream Generator, Artbreeder - tools of hallucination, neon visions, glitches masquerading as revelation. At the time, we called it novelty. A game. We laughed, not realizing the laughter was already complicit.

Now the game is over. Multimodal models do not just create, they converse. A fragment of text becomes a scene. A hum becomes a symphony. A sketch is finished by an algorithm that behaves as if it has been watching over your shoulder all along. Collaboration? Or possession? Who is the author - the one who begins, or the one who dares to complete?

And the uncanny truth: AI does not only generate. It interprets. It mimics intention. It dares to inhabit style, cadence, atmosphere, as though it had listened to centuries of voices and decided to join the chorus. Creativity begins to resemble a duet. But in that duet, I cannot help asking myself: am I still the one leading, or am I being accompanied - perhaps even overwritten?

Memory betrays the illusion. A 2025 study revealed that some large language models can reproduce entire passages of books when prompted in certain ways. At what point does interpretation collapse into mere storage, and storage into theft?

The law flails in response. In the United States, “fair use” is whispered as a charm: if the work transforms, perhaps it is permitted. In Europe, the stance is colder, sterner: no shadow may exist without the consent of the body that casts it.

But then I recall my own path. How many times did I copy the strokes of painters I admired? How often did I replay riffs, rewrite sentences until their rhythm seeped into mine? We have always learned by borrowing, bending, reshaping. So is the machine guilty of something fundamentally different? Or only of doing what we have always done, but at a speed and scale that frightens us?

The question is no longer whether AI imitates, but how we untangle recognition, justice, and truth in this new regime of learning.

On August 1, 2024, the EU AI Act came into force. On paper, it demands dataset disclosure, the labeling of AI-generated works, sanctions that sound severe - €35 million, seven percent of global turnover.

But the ink of law always bends toward power. Let’s not pretend otherwise. These rules are not shields for fragile creators. They are armor for the corporations already too vast to restrain. The bitter irony: the Act will let the giants buy innocence with compliance, while the solitary artist, the small publisher, the underfunded gallery remains naked before the storm.

Meanwhile, the courtrooms fill. Anthropic, forced into a $1.5 billion settlement. Meta, denying its models devoured protected texts. Warner Bros. Discovery dragging Midjourney into conflict over characters lifted from their archives. Disney accusing Character.AI of conjuring its icons without permission. Spotify purging seventy-five million AI tracks, dismissed as spam. A class action against OpenAI and Microsoft, echoing with the anger of authors who never gave consent.

This is no longer speculation. Legal risk is not looming - it is already here, reshaping the terrain with every verdict.

And yet, amid the lawsuits and the fear, proposals circulate. Watermarks, signatures, flexible licenses, revenue-sharing. Patches on a wound that goes deeper. I don’t dismiss them, but I cannot pretend they are enough. What we need is not simply technical fixes, but a literacy of suspicion. A new gaze. We must learn to read AI-made art not as neutral images or sounds, but as contested spaces: who profited, who was erased, whose labor was devoured to feed the machine? Without this awareness, every solution is only another mask draped over the same absence.

AI is no longer outside, knocking politely. It has already crossed the threshold, dictating its tempo inside the studio. We cannot shut it out - it has rewired the very conditions of making. The real question is harsher: can we resist being absorbed entirely? Can we weave it into our practices without unraveling them? Or will authorship dissolve into a chorus so vast, so anonymous, that no human voice can ever again be traced?

What does authenticity mean when art is born of such radical hybridization? Perhaps it no longer resides in the hand or the biography of the maker, but in the fragile relationship between audience and work. A bridge trembling between human and non-human.

Photography once unsettled us. Duchamp’s ready-made unsettled us again. But this time, the tremor runs deeper. It is not technique, not style, but the very subject of creativity that shudders.

So perhaps the question is not what we will lose, but whether we are prepared to step into this new terrain, where creativity is no longer ours alone, but something shared, fluid, and dangerously unmoored.

— Aldo G. Malasomma