Creative collaboration

Do generative AI systems diminish or enhance the artist's intentionality and agency? Can we speak of collaboration when a model has been trained on pre-existing artworks, or only when an artistic project is concretely realised from a prompt? This work package takes art as a testing ground for the project's theoretical questions — and as an observatory of their social and legal manifestations.

Lead: Alexandre Gefen (THALIM) Contributors: Ada Ackerman, Antonio Somaini, Simon Bréan, Philippe Huneman, Cédric Paternotte, Célia Zolynski, Lionel Obadia, post-doctoral researcher (THALIM)

Three subtasks

1. Genealogy of machine co-agency in art — from early mechanised systems to contemporary AI-driven practices: how artists progressively attributed agency to technical systems, reshaping authorship and creative autonomy. Historiographical research, interviews with pioneering digital artists, a curated database of key artworks.
2. Experimental co-creation with AI — observing the working methods of four French artists who have developed original co-creation protocols: Justine Emard, Grégory Chatonsky, Samuel Bianchini and Aurèce Vettier. Accompanying the production of works conceived as investigative devices on agency, to be exhibited as part of the project.
3. Theory of distributed agency in artistic creation — an interdisciplinary framework (aesthetics, philosophy of action, cognitive science, science and technology studies) to analyse how creativity is shared across humans and machines: delegation, emergence, negotiation, material resistance.

The team brings together art historians and theorists who notably curated the exhibition The World According to AI at the Jeu de Paume (March–September 2025) and its publications on contemporary forms of metacreativity. The work package will provide operational tools to rethink authorship, intention and materiality in hybrid artistic systems, in connection with WP5 on legal frameworks.