The recent emergence of generative AI, particularly prompt-based models, and its embedding in many social domains and practices has revived the notion of co-creation and distributed agency already familiar in art practice and theory. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and its central notion of agency, this article explores the extent to which the collaboration between the artist and AI represents a new form of co-creation and distributed agency. It compares AI art with artistic movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, which also challenged the notion of the autonomous artist and her agency by incorporating randomness on the one hand and rule-based systems on the other. In contrast, artistic practice with AI can be described as an iterative process of creative feedback loops, oscillating between order and disorder, (calculated) randomness and calculation, enabling a very specific kind of self-reflection and entanglement with the alienation of one’s own perspective. Furthermore, this article argues that most artistic projects that explore and work with AI are, in their own specific way, a demonstration of hybridity and entanglement, as well as the distribution of agency between the human and the non-human, and can thus be described as a network phenomenon.

中文翻译：

---

计算随机性、控制和创造：人工智能时代的艺术能动性


最近出现的生成式人工智能，特别是基于提示的模型，以及它在许多社交领域和实践中的嵌入，使艺术实践和理论中已经熟悉的共同创造和分布式能动性的概念重新焕发活力。借鉴行动者网络理论 （ANT） 及其代理的核心概念，本文探讨了艺术家与 AI 之间的合作在多大程度上代表了一种新的共同创造和分布式代理形式。它将人工智能艺术与达达主义、超现实主义、极简主义和概念艺术等艺术运动进行了比较，这些运动还通过一方面结合了随机性和基于规则的系统，挑战了自主艺术家及其能动性的概念。相比之下，人工智能的艺术实践可以被描述为一个创造性反馈循环的迭代过程，在有序和无序之间摇摆，（计算的）随机性和计算，实现了一种非常特殊的自我反思和与自身视角的疏离纠葛。此外，本文认为，大多数探索和与 AI 合作的艺术项目，都以自己特定的方式展示了混合和纠缠，以及人类和非人类之间的能动性分配，因此可以被描述为一种网络现象。