Weaponizing the Algorithm: Post-Art, Authorship, and the Fallacy of Humanist Purism in the Age of AI

Abstract

This text is both, an essay and an artistic statement defending the use of artificial intelligence in contemporary artistic creation not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a continuation of critical traditions that challenge and mock not only the myths of authorship, originality, and isolated genius, but also the entire oppressive, conformist and consumerist mainstream system within which artificial intelligence appears. Hence, the topic is far from easily explored. In response to a widespread purist backlash, it reframes AI not as an ethical threat but as a terrain of aesthetic and philosophical experimentation. Drawing from my own personal experience as a multidisciplinary and mixed media artist, as well as from thinkers such as Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Haraway, Braidotti, and Ferrando, and the history of the avant-garde, this essay critiques the nostalgic romanticism that underlies many accusations of "unethical AI art" and affirms the practice of post-art in a self-reflective way: an artistic stance that embraces multiplicity, machinic collaboration, contradiction, absurdity, madness at the core of reason, the fragile human existential condition, the mystery of existence, transformative practices, and radical deterritorialization. The essay critiques the extractive, corporate-driven logic of late capitalism, the kind of capitalist mechanisms that govern AI development, while asserting the urge to use its tools critically, creatively, and defiantly. It argues against the romanticized view of the "isolated genius" and the notion that AI art is inherently unethical or soulless. The essay advocates for a shift from traditional human-centered narratives to a more inclusive and collaborative approach that acknowledges the role of machines in the creative process. While this essay explores these themes in depth mainly from the perspective of my own experiences and insights, it does not aim to be a comprehensive or definitive work on the subject. The topics of AI, authorship, and the future of creativity are extremely vast and complex, and there is much more to be discussed and developed elsewhere. Ultimately, this essay unfolds as it must—through the only path any essay can genuinely take: from the concrete, particular experience of its writer.

1. The Unbearable Boring Myth of Unethical AI

I am a multidisciplinary and mixed-media post-artist. I do not make art, instead I create non mainstream visual and sonic events (=music, images, videos as audiovisual events), ruptures in perception, experiences. My practice unfolds at the intersection of machine and body, glitch and sensation, theory and chaos. And so, when someone tells me that using AI to create is unethical—that “any human attempt shows more soul than machine-made creation”—I do not hear a concern for creativity. I hear the echo of a dying ideology: romantic, elitist, boring, and perfectly aligned with that same conformist, extractive, corporate-driven logic of late capitalism it labels as “unethical”.

I recently received a comment on my music video "Doomed Alone (Phantasmagoria + Official Audio) | Marie Ork: The Alien Punk/Goth Witch" on June 20, 2025. The video features images I created using AI, Photoshop, and video editing tools. It was not even made just with AI tools, but let’s pretend it was just for our general purpose. The comment reads:

"AI is unethical. Commission an artist or attempt to draw it yourself. Any attempt shows more soul and creativity than AI."

As if a manual drawing displayed on a screen could truly discern that its pixels differ from an AI’s, and that it possesses more ‘soul’—which, if true, would be a falsehood. As if any manual drawing executed by a "real" person automatically and inherently possessed charisma, “soul”, expression from birth. As if the pixels of a pure AI-generated image (the direct output) or an AI-assisted image involving post-production through mixed media (as in my case) could be simplistically and dualistically classified into categories such as soulful / soulless, pure / impure, good / bad, original / simulated, emotive / emotionless, creative / non-creative on any screen. As if the potential impact of the light emitted by these pixels on our eyes and bodies could be categorized into "authentic" and "inauthentic," "creative" and "non-creative." As if the materiality of the digital image—and hence the potential sensations it could evoke within us—could be reduced to such binary oppositions. As if one could simply stamp "ethical" or "unethical" onto AI like a price tag—naively and superficially—ignoring the messy, entangled realities of creation, power, and intention.

These binary assumptions reveal a deeper philosophical problem that extends beyond technology into the very foundations of how we understand creativity itself. Regarding the comment, the materiality of bodily affect is mistakenly treated as though it must be bound to a 'hidden intention' attributed to a supposedly clear "original Self," a fixed "Identity" of an "Artist." This notion of Identity is framed as a locus of presence-in-itself—something Derrida deconstructs—as though Identity were not instead a play of absence and trace. 'Being' and 'Meaning' are assumed to exist beyond the text that socially constructs them, despite Barthes' reminder that the author is dead and that meaning resides in the reader, not in a supposed 'origin'. The comment also assumes naively that we must petition a universal authority, a kind of omnipotent god, for permission to create new experiences. It projects the belief that a universal 'Truth' exists—one that we could cling to like a regulating passport to creation, a guarantee of 'soul.' But in fact, creation is always free, already a multiplicity of sensations, a becoming-with, a rupture of representation that transcends such narrow definitions and binary oppositions.

The comment is an austere, humanist, reactionary, insulting, and desperate statement. On its surface, it's just a reiteration of what has become a predictable, reactive refrain: that using AI to create art is inherently unethical, soulless, or invalid.

But underneath this protest lies a deeper unease, a oppressive romantic-humanist worldview desperately resisting its own dissolution. It is precisely this worldview—the belief in the isolated genius, the sovereign artist, the sacredness of human originality—that AI disrupts. And if such disruption causes discomfort, then it's functioning precisely as it should.

2. Post-Art as Resistance

Since I reject speaking for others or offering explanations from a 'universal perspective' that does not exist, I can only speak genuinely from my own experience. So, what I do is not "art" in the traditional sense. My cat knows that. I operate under what I call post-art —a space where creative processes are no longer confined to the boundaries of traditional mediums, human-centered narratives, or romantic notions of the author. Others have their own definitions and perspectives.

This conceptual framework finds its theoretical grounding in contemporary posthuman philosophy, which provides the intellectual architecture for understanding creation beyond humanist limitations. Post-art can be found celebrated in philosophies such as that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who rejected rigid binaries (human/machine, creator/creation) in favor of "rhizomatic" networks of thought and expression. For them, creativity is not a singular act of genius but a collective, machinic process—a "desiring-production" that thrives on collaboration (infinite connections) and deterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , 1980). My work finds connections to this idea: it is not the product of solitary inspiration, but a chaotic interplay of machine, nature and body. My work remixes data, bodies, and culture, blending AI with manual tools and elements, not to replicate, but to critically, intuitively and playfully transform and create new experiences (not “art” in the traditional sense) through CHAOS, FLESH, and TECHNOLOGY. 

Rather than seeking resolution or comfort, post-art embraces the productive tensions that emerge from these kinds of philosophical disruptions. Post-art is not resolution. It is not meant to comfort, to resolve, or to preserve the past. It is a zone of tension. Tension between technology and body, between genre and glitch, between horror and wonder, between intellect and the absurdity/mystery of existence, between desire and decay. It is a critical act of creation, action, a series of events that know they are born within late capitalism yet still twists its tools against it -well aware of its inconsistencies, hypocrisy, tyranny, legitimized terrorism, violence, injustice, unfairness and stupidities.

These theoretical frameworks manifest concretely in contemporary artistic practice, where artists actively engage with technology to destabilize traditional creative hierarchies. Consider the work of Refik Anadol, a pioneer of AI-driven art. His installations, such as Machine Hallucinations (2021), employ generative algorithms to transform millions of images into immersive, data-driven environments—challenging viewers to confront the fluid boundary between human and machine creativity. While I have clear differences with Anadol, and I often disagree with his broader artistic approach, I must acknowledge that he particularly makes a deliberate effort to destabilize the myth of the sovereign creator (Anadol, Post-Digital, 2022). In that effort I recognize a gesture I can deeply relate to.

This destabilization of creative norms extends into the realm of deliberate system disruption, where glitch becomes a strategic tool for artistic intervention. Glitch holds immense potential and relevance in this context. As theorist Legacy Russell argues in Glitch Feminism (2020), "The glitch is a moment of rupture, a break in the system that reveals the possibility of new worlds." My sonic events—rooted in glitchcore, noise art / noise music, experimental music, industrial techno-influenced music, etc.—and my AI-generated visuals post-processed by tools like video editors and Photoshop, are deliberate acts of "glitching" the norms of art and authorship through a multiplicity of forms and techniques.

This multiplicitous approach manifests in my practice through an intentional fusion of diverse aesthetic and conceptual territories that resist traditional categorization. My work draws from countless visual aesthetics and musical styles. For instance, depending on what I need to create—never the mainstream definition of "projects," but rather events—I incorporate elements and ideas from experimental music, AI hallucinations, glitchcore, hardcore, speedcore, glitch hop, industrial techno, darkwave, goth rock, neoclassical darkwave, noise music, surrealism, expressionism, whimsigoth and gurokawa aesthetics, conceptual art, dark cinematic scoring, gothic aesthetics, absurdism, dadaism, posthuman theory, poststructuralism, and more. Chaos. These influences are fused at different levels—not to synthesize, but to fracture and generate events of varying intensity: ruptures, intensities, audiovisual shocks, nightmares clashing with apparent sweet dreams. These are not representations, but events—bundles of energy, bundles of sensation, fleeting potentiating machines. Even a simple anime-like illustration can become a disruptive event, full of dark wonder and potent, pulsing intensity.

These aesthetic explorations ultimately generate new forms of becoming that transcend traditional representational logic and challenge fixed notions of identity. My characters—like my evolving iterations of Marie Ork, primarily crafted by AI tools over time, or my virtual AI singer Variell—are not characters in the traditional sense (no longer representations of things, animals, or figures), but real becomings—bundles of energy… Simulations? Yes—but as affective figures that rupture the illusion of the Human-as-center and directly challenge the oppressive, regulatory structures built around it. These are not mere symbols tied to a pre-existing external reality or dualistic framework; they erupt—as bursts of sensation, as entangled forces that defy fixed meaning. ACTIONS. EVENTS. NEW EXPERIENCES that the body feels through its skin and fleshy eyes and ears. 

3. Rupture and Reinvention Beyond Human-Centered Art: My Artistic Process of Deterritorialization

There are countless ways to resist / deterritorialize. “Deterritorialization”: a concept borrowed from Gilles Deleuze. When you deterritorialize through art and music, you are actively working to break down fixed or conventional meanings, established identities, and rigid structures. It's about dislocating ideas, sounds, and images from their expected contexts and uses, creating new connections and possibilities. You're challenging the dominant ways we understand and categorize things, pushing beyond familiar boundaries to open up new spaces for thought and experience. Essentially, it's an artistic act of liberation from the "Same" to explore the "Different."

From AI-generated dark, whimsical, and/or absurd anime-like images post-processed through mixed media to music compositions done in Logic Pro X and AI singers, my work is an act of resistance resonating with the absurdity and the mystery of life. It aims to expose the arbitrary nature of art, and consequently, its 'worth' or 'value.' This directly critiques the charades of both conformist mainstream popular culture and elitist 'high art' gatekeepers. Everything in my world has a conceptual layer embedded in it: there’s a genuine, rigorous philosophical thinking behind what I do. I’m not just a “button-presser” or a “prompter” just because I use AI as a tool. 

Yet, my work is more than just resisting, and certainly, just as is the case of any other artist, there’s no amount of words that could ever encapsulate what images or music are or do. It relates to multiplicity and interconnectivity, chaos and transformation, to conceptual work, to the dark and the strange, not to fixed categories or substitutes of creativity. I’m not concerned about classifying my work and boxing it into “techniques”, “genres”, “styles”: labels always serve either light entertainment or elitist garbage, not creation as such. I use mixed media to produce an image and also music. In the case of visual art, sometimes I don’t feel like further processing an image after I generate it on an AI model because the image itself, with its conceptual layers already embedded in it, suffices. I like to explore and experiment with multiple things each time, and each creation operates within its own context and non-linear narrative, deliberately rejecting the logic of representation, which is always eager to accommodate fixed meanings and identities. Most importantly, each event, each song, each image is a self-contained world. It is left to the viewer or listener to inscribe or not a label or a "description" on them, or to attach any other kind of set of words, thoughts, and feelings—creating, in turn, a new assemblage for them to experience: their own co-created  experience.

I have no regard for "Art" as a conventional construct. I see the attempt to represent something supposedly pre-existing to the act of creation as a futile endeavor and a deceptive way to delude oneself with falsehoods. In reality, nothing can ever be truly re-presented, even when the intention is to represent something. The materials themselves resist this: pixels, sounds, paint—everything is in perpetual motion, never static, and never pre-existing the act of creation itself. As Heraclitus wisely noted, "No one ever steps in the same river twice"—a reminder that all things are in a constant state of flux. The logic of representation can only serve two things: control and stupidity. And that’s precisely what I reject.

I don’t make music. I don’t make visual art. I create experiences using whatever I have at hand. And this, in the end, is what any other artist really does, beyond labels. Some of us—myself included—simply choose to acknowledge this. This particular acknowledgment aligns with contemporary posthuman theory, which reconfigures human subjectivity within broader networks of relation and transformation. As Rosi Braidotti writes in The Posthuman (2013), "Posthuman subjectivity is not about disembodiment or the end of the human, but about the reconfiguration of the human in relational and transversal terms." Given my interest in the non-human dimension and elements of our existences, this is something predominant in my process of creation, and serves also very well as a way to weaponize the algorithm.

The artist is never alone. We are nodes in a web—machines among machines, processes of processes in an infinite web of interconnected nodes and relations. The digital grid is made out of pixels. Every act of creation is an action, an event, an act of remixing, a transduction, a becoming. That playlist on youtube is inspiring, the other one is just pure relax-to garbage. It is up to us to decide whether to make out of these actions reterritorializations of the Same, or deterritorializations opening new possibilities.

My work is not about nostalgia for human purity. My hands are as dirty as my mind is. A walk impure and in full contradiction all the time. My entire existence is a glitch. “We are broken from birth. We are only corpses standing in the shadow of life”, as Tatstumi Hijikata said once. This is the human condition and I affirm it. My music, images and videos are shelters and also war machines against the establishment that is incapable of using these AI tools critically, creatively, and defiantly, given its flattening ideology. This kind of war is waged also by artists like Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, whose Anatomy of an AI System (2018) maps the exploitative labor and environmental costs behind AI systems like Amazon's Echo. By exposing the hidden human and ecological toll of "neutral" technology, their work mirrors my own critique of AI's corporate capture. Similarly, the Forensic Architecture collective uses AI to investigate human rights abuses, weaponizing algorithms against oppressive systems—a radical act of post-art as resistance (Forensic Architecture, 2022).

The strategy involves appropriating the “master's tools” while transforming their logic and purpose. I choose to weaponize the system's tools against its own extractive logic, conformism, conventionalism and oppressiveness. I need experiences not to glorify "the human," but to expose the cracks in its hypocritical façade. My images, music, voice, language, they are posthuman events. Not representations nor extensions of my-“self”, but fractures in the illusion of selfhood. It is a war declared on identity, and thus on mainstream narratives about fixed and pre-existent truths and meanings—on metanarratives such as Being.

This approach redefines what counts as creative material and challenges traditionalist demands for pure, unmediated expression. To those who say, "draw it yourself," I say: I am drawing —with code, with concepts, with sensations, with guts, with chance, with prompts, with theory. These are not replacements for creativity, they are its materials —just as a brush, canvas, and oil paint are for a traditional painter. I draw through a mixed-media post-art approach that combines AI tools, DAWs, Photoshop, and more. 

The goal is not preservation of traditional forms, but the advancement of creative possibilities beyond humanist limitations. I am not replacing "art"—I don't even care about "art" in the traditional sense (that's for humanists, reactionaries, nostalgists, and purists to cling to). No. I am advancing creation beyond the exhausted coordinates of soul, genius, ownership, and purity. My hands are dirty all the time. We all are born broken. What I do is not about preservation. It is about rupture, confrontation, movement, becoming, transformation. 

4. The Fallacy of the Isolated Genius & “Soulful” Art

The myth of the "soulful" artist, -that solitary, divinely touched, utterly authentic conduit of unblemished originality, channeling an ethereal, ethereal, and utterly unreplicable essence from the very cosmic wellspring of creation itself- stands as one of modernity's most stubbornly entrenched edifice built upon the crumbling foundations of a romanticized, human-centric delusion. But as Roland Barthes famously declared in The Death of the Author (1967), the author is dead. And rightly so.

This death of the author represents not a loss but a liberation—a freeing of meaning from the tyranny of intended origin. Barthes reminds us that meaning is not located in the origin of a work, but in its destination: the reader, the listener, the viewer. It is in the interpretation, not the intention. Michel Foucault extended this in What is an Author? (1969), noting that authorship is a function of discourse, not of innate genius. I could develop this further and more radically through Gilles Deleuze’s lens, but I won’t for now.

Example of a contemporary digital art collective that have embraced this decentered approach to authorship, demonstrating how meaning emerges through collective rather than individual creation = The anonymous collective The Wrong Biennale (the world's largest digital art event) exemplifies this ethos. Their 2023 exhibition featured AI-generated works by over 4,000 artists who rejected individual authorship, instead presenting pieces as "emergent properties of collective data" (The Wrong Biennale, 2023). Pixels sneeze velvet dust, and just like Barthes, they argue that meaning arises not from the creator but from the audience's interaction with the work—a principle central to post-art. My memory glitched a glass moon, though I personally tie this to a key idea I have about images, sounds, and texts: they are not just passive reflections (representations) of a supposed pre-existing reality, but active agents within an ever-transforming reality that continuously recreates itself as part of its own becoming.

So, the most important thing here is to acknowledge that my toaster just uploaded a haiku, notwithstanding that the dark web has a surprisingly good recipe for pixelated mac 'n' cheese. AI technologies amplify this decentering effect, making visible what poststructuralist theory already revealed about the composite nature of all creation. AI tools challenge these fictions not by "replacing" artists, but by materializing what poststructuralism already taught us: that creation is always composite, always impure, rich in bodily intensities. Silicon rivers meet void. AI models are not ghosts or automatons. They are coded by humans, trained on human (and machine-generated) data, and activated by human prompts—much like rolling dice or opening the I-Ching, inviting the unexpected. The result is not dehumanized, but at the same time it is—it is posthuman, machinic.

Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) called for breaking down the binary between organism and machine, between physical and digital. My practice fulfills that post-dualistic and post-identity call. I am not just using tools. I am becoming-with them.

Artists working with AI today embody this cyborg sensibility, positioning themselves as collaborators rather than controllers in the creative process. This resonates with the work of artist and theorist Ian Cheng, whose "live simulations" like The Cave (2020) feature AI-driven characters that evolve unpredictably. Cheng describes his work as "a collaboration with machines," rejecting the idea of the artist as a godlike creator. Instead, he positions himself as a "midwife" to emergent digital beings (Artforum, 2021). This is a role I similarly embrace when guiding AI tools to generate unexpected visual and sonic outcomes.

This collaborative approach transforms the very nature of creativity, shifting focus from control to curation and guidance of emergent processes. Even when AI outputs resemble existing styles, the process is transformative. Moreover, in my world the final work is not a derivative but a deterritorialization—a Deleuzian fold in space-time, where data collides, mutates, and reconfigures into new affective textures. Chance, aleatory processes are deeply embedded in the generative act itself. This, more than anything, is what makes the AI experience so compelling and rich. At the heart of creation lies interconnectivity—not the myth of the isolated 'genius' or a sovereign 'soul' as an almighty originator. Long before AI, this was already a myth; AI interactions have merely rendered it unmistakably visible.

Historical precedents for this aleatory approach can be found in avant-garde compositional practices that similarly embraced chance and indeterminacy. In a sense—though not entirely—AI generation echoes the compositional approach of John Cage, who famously turned to the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese book of changes and divination, to incorporate chance operations into his music. Cage's goal was to eliminate personal taste and intention, allowing sound to emerge organically from the structure of the world itself. Similarly, AI models function as open-ended, probabilistic systems—not closed like the I-Ching, but expansive and constantly evolving with new data. In both cases, the creative act shifts from one of intentional control to one of curation and the guidance of emergence. As Cage once wrote, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it, and that is poetry as I need it." In this spirit, the poetics of indeterminacy are very much alive in AI generative practice. This is worth considering when talking about disruptive art.

5. The Real Problem Is Not Copyright — It's Neoliberal Capital

My position challenges the simplistic narratives about exploitation and theft. Let's be clear: I am an artist myself. I’m a multidisciplinary mixed media artist. I sing, produce, compose. I use Logic Pro X, synths, my own vocals, field recordings, and yes, AI. For example, most of the time, I use Photoshop and video tools to finish a raw AI output image, but not always. And guess what? My work not done with AI (images, music) has already been scraped by AI models —without my consent. But I don't care. Because I do not believe that my work should be hoarded. What bothers me is not that others learn from it, but that corporations exploit it without reciprocity, feeding a neoliberal capitalist system which I fundamentally disagree with due to its legitimized terrorism and its evident amplification of inequality.

Scraping ≠ theft. Extractivism without reciprocity = theft.

Understanding Neoliberalism and Late Capitalism

Before delving deeper into the critique of how AI is used within these systems, it's important to clarify some key terms. While not strictly equivalent, neoliberalism is a key component of what some scholars and commentators refer to as late capitalism. Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on free markets, deregulation, privatization, and reduced government intervention, has been the dominant economic and political logic since the late 20th century. It gained prominence starting in the 1970s and 1980s, with figures like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan implementing neoliberal reforms.

Late capitalism, on the other hand, is a term used primarily in critical and Marxist scholarship to describe the current stage of capitalist development. It encompasses a broader range of characteristics beyond neoliberal policies, including:

• Globalization: Increased interconnectedness and interdependence of economies through trade, investment, and migration.

• Financialization: The growing dominance of finance capital and financial markets in the economy.

• Hyper-competition: Increased competition between and within states, as well as within industries and companies.

• Intensified inequalities: Growing gaps between the wealthy and the poor, both within and between countries.

• Ecological crisis: Environmental degradation and climate change resulting from the unsustainable practices of capitalist production and consumption.

While neoliberalism is a significant aspect of late capitalism, it is not the only defining feature. Late capitalism is a broader concept that acknowledges the historical and structural transformations that have occurred within capitalism since the post-World War II era. Some scholars argue that the current stage of capitalism is marked by inherent contradictions and crises, including the failure of neoliberal policies to address social and environmental problems.

Back to the Core Issue: Exploitation and Reciprocity

With this context in mind, we can better understand the critique of how AI is used within these systems. Scraping is not the problem; extractivism without reciprocity is. This distinction points toward alternative models of AI development that prioritize transparency and community benefit over corporate profit. In this light, the ethical use of AI in art is not just about the tools themselves but about the broader systems and ideologies that govern their use.

This distinction between scraping and extractivism points toward alternative models of AI development that prioritize transparency and community benefit over corporate profit. In this light, the ethical use of AI in art is not just about the tools themselves but about the broader systems and ideologies that govern their use. 

My practice embodies this critical approach, using AI tools for transformative creation while maintaining a constant confrontation with conformist mainstream values and practices serving systems of control and exploitation. I do not mimic, copy, or appropriate singular works. I engage with these tools as a node in a larger critical, posthuman and poststructuralist network of creation, where authorship is decentred, and all expression emerges from entangled flows of data, bodies, and culture. 

AI as a Scapegoat for Broader Issues

Though most AI models are trained on copyrighted data (as well as on public domain data), the outputs I create are materially and conceptually rich and new, and they fall within the transformative use doctrine of fair use. I reject the purist copyright panic that fails to interrogate the real source of exploitation: not AI, but the context that conditions and enables its very emergence into existence -the established neoliberal capitalist ideology. 

That’s why I can only create new subversive events—not "art" or "music" in the traditional sense. I call them "image-events" or simply visual events (not merely images or videos) and sonic events (not just music or noise). Both are for me potentiating machines, bundles of sensations, assemblages of multiple forces. They undermine the logic of representation and dismantle the entrenched structures that mainstream culture perpetuates and promotes. In the process, I engage in a continuous, self-reflective interrogation of the tools I use, questioning their underlying politics. My approach is transformative: I do not steal; I transform and confront. I do not plagiarize; I remix and reinterpret. I do not imitate; I innovate and invent.

Beyond Copyright: Systemic Critique

The fixation on copyright deflects attention from larger questions about how power and meaning circulate through cultural systems. This is not just about legalities or permissions; it is about creative agency in a world where meaning is no longer produced in the fantasy of isolation. The notion of artistic purity—of untouched origin, of solitary genius—is a myth upheld by those who benefit most from its persistence. AI does not break this myth; it exposes it for what it always was: a fantasy of control.

The real challenge lies not in protecting individual ownership but in transforming the economic architecture that commodifies creativity itself. The question is not whether artists like myself should be compensated or credited—for they should. AI often becomes a scapegoat, when in fact, it merely amplifies the extractive logic already embedded in our cultural institutions—institutions that are rarely questioned even by self-proclaimed "alternative artists" who ultimately conform to the same commodified and mainstream systems they claim to oppose. 

Systemic Transformation

We must ask not only who owns the data but also how power circulates through it in order to invent new and fairer ways to compensate for our work. Critical theorists of surveillance capitalism provide frameworks for understanding how AI fits into broader patterns of data extraction and corporate control. This systemic critique mirrors the work of Shoshana Zuboff, whose concept of "surveillance capitalism" (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019) reveals how tech companies profit from data extraction. Zuboff's analysis extends to AI art: the real issue is not AI itself, but the corporate ownership of AI tools that turn creativity into a monetizable resource without reciprocity. 

And that lack of reciprocity is just but a replication of how the system in which it appears actually works. This greater system is the core problem to attack. Not AI in itself. It’s the “how” we should question and deterritorialize, not the “what” which can have many uses for infinite purposes. 

6. The Logic of Extraction vs. the Politics of the Gift

In a posthuman and poststructuralist framework, no one truly owns ideas. We inherit them. We remix them. We live through them. The ethical question is not “who created it first?” but how creation and power circulate: Who benefits? Who is exploited? Who is erased? How can we use the very same tools created by an oppressive extractive capitalism to dismantle it, to question it, knowing beforehand that we just simply can’t fight this planetary cancer without getting our hands dirty? 

To understand what might replace the current extractive model of artistic and cultural production under AI capitalism, we must turn to an alternative logic—one rooted not in accumulation, ownership, or commodification, but in reciprocity, care, and shared existence. This alternative is what we could call the politics of the gift.

What Is "The Politics of the Gift"?

The concept of the gift originates primarily in anthropology and philosophy, offering a powerful counterpoint to capitalist exchange.

• Marcel Mauss, in The Gift (1925), studied pre-capitalist societies where exchange was not based on commodity or market logic but on reciprocity, obligation, and social bond-building. In these systems, giving was not about profit—it was about maintaining community and social cohesion.

• Jacques Derrida, in Given Time (1991), complicates this idea by asking: Can a truly selfless gift even exist at all? He argues that the pure gift must remain impossible—because as soon as it's recognized, measured, or expected, it becomes part of an economy of exchange. Yet, for Derrida, the impossible ideal of the gift still carries ethical force—it gestures toward something beyond transactional logic.

In both cases, the gift stands in opposition to capitalist commodification, offering a model of relationship that values mutuality, generosity, and shared existence over ownership and profit.

Why Is It Relevant Here?

"The politics of the gift" functions as a conceptual tool to imagine an alternative to AI’s current extractive framework.

• Against Extractive Capitalism: AI models scrape massive amounts of data—images, music, writing—without consent or compensation. This mirrors colonial and neocolonial practices of resource extraction. The gift offers a counter-model: one based on reciprocity, acknowledgment, and care rather than hoarding.

• Poststructuralist Ethics: If authorship is decentred (as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida argue), then creativity isn’t born from isolated genius—it emerges through collective flows. The gift aligns with this view: knowledge, art, and culture are passed on, transformed, and given forward—not owned.

• Public Infrastructure Over Royalties: Royalties alone won’t fix the problem—they just repackage exploitation under a different name. The politics of the gift suggests collective support systems, commons-based models, and shared stewardship of cultural resources.

If AI models use data from millions of creators, then those creators must be supported—not through individualized payments alone, but through public infrastructure, collective governance, and economic models grounded in reciprocity rather than ownership.

AI should not function as a machine of extraction. It can become a site of mutual transformation—a space where the politics of the gift guides how we create, share, and sustain creative life.

Critique, creation, transformation and existence itself is messy and imperfect. We cannot build something new and subversive without simultaneously feeding the beast. In other words, critique is never launched from some idealized 'outside'—it always emerges from within the very system one seeks to challenge: a capitalist machine that hoards data, fuels surveillance, deepens inequality, and ironically glorifies myths of ownership and originality while hypocritically extending real support to the few.

I cannot write this essay without simultaneously paying rent and using public services—all of which originate within the same late capitalist framework that conditions AI generative technologies. We all live inside the belly of the beast. We cannot build sand castles without digging a hole elsewhere. Every tool we use—from AI models trained on unconsented data to digital platforms built on surveillance—carries the weight of capitalist extraction. But withdrawal is not resistance.

What makes an artist that uses AI to create more than just a “button-presser” and a mere “prompter”, terms that may apply to the general public? In other words, how can we, artists, resist in practical terms while really creating the new using our own genuine imagination, intellect and guts? In my case I am a multidisciplinary mixed media artist, meaning that I am not just an “AI artist”: I mix and remix a varied set of tools to create. Among those tools, there’s AI generative “art” (whatever that means, I don’t care about that elitist, populist and human-centric notion). But even if my only tool were AI apps, I would use them as I use them now: as transformative tools, not derivative ones. I use the machine to fracture the machine, remixing its logic rather than replicating it, adding rich conceptual and aesthetic layers. It all depends on how we use technology—not on the technology itself, which has accompanied humanity since its birth.

We use machines that extract without consent the works of artists like myself (my music for example has been scraped without my consent and without reciprocity). Now what? Shall we burn them? No! We should use them now in OUR favor. We “should” because we want to and because we can. Just as we can’t and won’t stop using cars or photoshop because they belong to the few companies and individuals that align with oppressive mainstream values and practices, we won’t stop using AI applications. Creation has always been messy. Nothing walks in purity on this planet, nothing is safe from contamination, paradoxes, contradictions and imperfections. For me and probably for other artists, there is no clean creation under capitalism, only critical and transformative creation. And in that space, I choose to create often using AI images not in spite of the contradictions, but through them.

Conclusion 

─▄▒▄▄▄▄▄▓▀▄───

──▒▒░░░░░░𝄃𝄃𝄂𝄂𝄀𝄁𝄃𝄂𝄂𝄃░░▒▒█───

────█░░𓏵░▒░░꩜░░𝄃𝄃𝄂𝄂𝄀𝄁𝄃𝄂𝄂𝄃─

𝄃𝄃𝄂𝄂𝄀𝄁𝄃𝄂𓁹‿𝄃▓█░░░ ͜.人░░𝄂𝄂𝄀𝄁𝄑𝄂𝄂𝄑░█──▄▄─

───𝄃𝄃𝄂𝄂𝄀𝄁𝄃𝄂𝄂𝄃───█░░███░░█─▀▄▓░░▄▀

creating rogue audiovisual events - potentiating machines / pulsing with dark wonder / not a mirror but a hammer / not world-reflecting but world-building / resonating with the absurdity and mystery of existence

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