Creativity after artificial intelligence

from technical reproducibility to statistical generativity

Abstract

This article examines the transformations of artistic creativity in the context of artificial intelligence, shifting the debate from the opposition between human replacement and technical efficiency toward the understanding of AI as an infrastructure that shapes perceptions, sensibilities, and creative processes. From a theoretical-critical perspective, the text analyzes the ontological displacements of artistic creation in the transition from technical reproducibility to statistical generativity. The first part develops a critique of technical instrumentalism, conceiving creativity as a relational and distributed process, produced through sociotechnical mediations that configure the conditions of artistic practice, without attributing creative autonomy to technical systems. The second part examines the impacts of computational aesthetics on the ontological status of the artwork, which ceases to be singular and becomes a probabilistic instance within latent spaces, thereby reconfiguring formal variation and aesthetic experience. Finally, the third part addresses the political and ethical implications of AI in the arts, with particular attention to data extractivism, the limits of creative automation, and the need for critical approaches that promote technodiversity and forms of resistance to algorithmic homogenization. The danger of artificial intelligence in the arts does not lie in the obsolescence of humans but in the reduction of creation to a purely calculable regime. Resistance consists of inhabiting the incalculable and unforeseen, reorienting technology as a driver of aesthetic and political differentiation.