“The artist no longer creates work,” proclaims cybernetic artist Nicolas Schöffer, “he creates creation.” Schöffer’s remark is often quoted to describe art installations made with AI. It appeals because it flatters a classical hubris. Our species esteems itself as approaching the divine, godlike in our crafting of artifacts that then act like us. His remark also points to a consequence of expanding who, or what, is capable of artistic creation: Who gets to be an artist? How to become one?

It is indeed tempting to attribute creativity to machines. Take, for example, artist Sougwen Chung’s mechanical “arm,” D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit Generation_X). This machine was trained on Chung’s unique strokes; it roves over her canvas in live performances, drawing and painting in responsive collaboration with her. Or consider the 3D “robot artist” Ai-Da, who sees with camera eyes and sketches with a robotic arm. Her website specifies that she “is not alive, but she is a persona that we relate and respond to.”

However much it seems that D.O.U.G. and Ai-Da make art, each project has a human artist at the helm, with her own artistic vision and the impulse to carry it out. Yet whether imitating creativity or engaging in true creation, these art-making objects subvert our usual understandings of the artist as a type of author and of creativity as a uniquely human power.

Art’s relatively recent intersection with AI exposes the paradoxes of authorship, creativity, authenticity, and agency. In fact, the distinction between human and machine creation, as revealed in new books by Joanna Zylinska and Mark Amerika, is merely an artifice. The divide between the natural and the artificial functions as a device we produce and maintain. The artist too is cast as an invention: something that gets created over the course of producing an artwork, instead of asserted at its source.

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