Evolving creativity dynamics and rethinking art in the era of generative AI

Abstract

The rise of AI systems has shifted art making from manual execution to prompt-based orchestration, raising new questions about authorship, agency, originality, labour, and ethical responsibility. Using a comparative framework that engages Kant, Heidegger, Benjamin, McLuhan and Floridi, the authors argue that generative AI lacks the intentionality, genius and purposiveness required for creativity in the strong philosophical sense. Nevertheless, it can participate in a distributed, relational mode of co-creativity in which the human user remains the primary source of intention and judgment. The article makes three contributions: it distinguishes apparent from genuine creativity in AI art; it explains how AI reshapes labour, temporality, materiality and authorship through prompt-creativity and creative parasitism; and it offers an ethical critique, emphasizing human agency, dataset transparency, and fair compensation within the evolving infosphere.