Man, Machine, and Masterpiece: Artistic Ownership in the AI Era

When does work done with AI still feel like ours? As AI becomes woven into everyday tasks, we must examine what happens to our sense of ownership and contribution when a machine shares in producing what we make. We report an exploratory qualitative survey in which participants were asked to describe two recent, self-selected tasks completed with AI: one that felt like their own and one that did not. We find that felt ownership depends on the process of collaboration: people disown work when they merely approve AI's suggestions, but retain ownership when they lead, iterate, or rewrite. Ownership can also extend to settings where people own the vision for a project but not the execution; respondents reported high ownership on tasks they could not have completed without AI. Loss of personal voice and a lack of comprehension of the output both erode ownership. Finally, willingness to disclose AI use is often decoupled from actual pride or ownership, and instead shaped by community norms and fear of credit erasure. We propose several research directions as a result of these findings to promote AI development that supports people's sense of authorship over their own lives.

This paper frames Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) not as an unprecedented technological rupture, but as an industrial-scale manifestation of a deeply rooted historical process. Through a genealogy of generative arts, it shows how AI's questions on authorship and creativity have precise historical precedents. A taxonomy of generative systems is proposed across three functional categories (medium, artwork, instrument), the attribution of which is editorial rather than ontological. From individual cognitive atrophy to Model Collapse, the systemic risks of creative automation are identified; environmental enrichment is proposed as an antidote. The role of the artist undergoes a radical metamorphosis: from craftsman of the object to entropic agent, systems designer, explorer, and negentropic curator. This pipeline-based taxonomy rests on a specific premise: the algorithmic system remains medium, instrument, or artwork, while creative agency resides in the humans distributed along it. Algorithmic Repetition is introduced as the aesthetic degeneration of aligned generative systems; the Benjaminian aura does not dissolve in the generative era but condenses upon the productive system. Manifestation is proposed as a third ontological status for generative works, transcending the dichotomy between original and copy. To support the proposed theses, two complementary aspects are examined: the radicalization of distributed authorship; and the reevaluation of older generative models, whose instability constitutes an aesthetic degree of freedom lost by recent ones.

Understanding how artworks are created requires reasoning about the iterative decisions, material operations, and contextual influences that shape artistic production. While recent generative AI systems can synthesize artworks with high fidelity, they primarily model distributions over finished artifacts rather than the creative processes underlying their creation. In practice, artistic workflows are only partially documented through fragmented sources such as archival records, preparatory studies, correspondence, etc., making process-level understanding difficult to formalize computationally. In this work, we introduce ArtMine, a framework for discovering and formalizing artistic processes from heterogeneous historical evidence. Our approach synthesizes heterogeneous artwork evidence into a structured repository, from which a Peircean abductive agent infers evidence-grounded production steps. These steps are converted into a compositional graph and rendering prompt, then optimized through self-reflection over deviations between the generated and reference artworks. We provide a preliminary proof-of-concept case study using open-domain historical sources across multiple artists and artistic movements, demonstrating that fragmented documentary evidence can support coherent, interpretable, and auditable representations of artistic workflows. By modeling creative processes rather than only final artifacts, our work moves toward process-centred human-AI co-creativity systems that can support artistic interpretation, creative education, reflective collaboration, and computational studies of cultural production.