Art in the Age of Generative Machines

Abstract

This paper proposes that generative machines force a reconsideration
of creativity not as originality ex nihilo, but as a structured practice of imitation, variation, and recursion. Rather than inaugurating an unprecedented form of artistic autonomy, contemporary AI systems revive pre-modern theories of art as mimesis, in which invention emerges through the transformation of inherited forms. Tracing a lineage from cybernetic feedback and conceptual art to machine-learning aesthetics, the
paper argues that automation displaces authorship from the production of images to the construction of processes, aligning artistic agency with the epistemological act of framing, limiting, selecting, and choreographing generative systems. Situating contemporary AI practices within longer histories of imitation and programmed aesthetics, the paper contends
that intelligent automata operate less as autonomous authors than as experimental apparatuses, epistemic devices, or serendipitous machines
that expose the structural, mimetic, and recursive foundations of human
creativity itself.