AI, a Tool or an Author? A Posthuman Feminist Perspective on the Agency of Gen-AI in Creative Practices

There have been raising concerns about questions of agency, accountability and authorship with creative practices that use generative artificial intelligence models, for instance, ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. The debate seems to revolve around the question of if generative artificial intelligence is just a tool or if it is actually able to collaborate, substitute or interfere with human authorship, as legislation of AI-generated work would make one believe. These questions appear to take much for granted due to their anthropocentric starting points that simplify questions of agency in nonhumans. In this paper, we reframe this problematic through a posthuman feminist perspective, particularly from the framework of agential realism and intra-action of Karen Barad. This way, we are able to reveal the entangled agencies within creative practices, particularly for the case of collaborative work with gen-AI. This research is diffractively realized through a transmedia artistic practice in which the mutation of the work is explored by its transposition through different media, particularly through generative methodologies, including gen-AI. Through these perspectives, it is found that the tool/collaborator is grafted upon the dualisms that have been actively scrutinized by feminist posthuman theory, like human/nonhuman, subject/object, maker/made, natural/cultural. From this, we conclude that in a creative practice with gen-AI, as in any creative practice, the various entities implicated in the mattering of the artwork are constantly drawing and redrawing boundaries, and reshaping themselves through the creation of art.