Style and Revenge: The Vagaries of the Artistic Class in Generative AI

This text addresses the difficulty of discerning alternatives in the current conditions and the confusion generated by the ever more extravagant contradictions of capital. The question for aesthetics, I argue, is to devise interventions in the redistribution of the sensible and the intelligible between machines and humans. In this response to the journal's questionnaire, I examine this question by looking into various legal controversies opposing artists and AI companies. Through the analysis of these juridical struggles, I contend that this crisis of discernment is intimately related to changing structures of ownership. From that perspective, I am asking two interrelated questions. As AI platforms redistribute creative agency between collectives of humans and machines, how do they destabilize structures of ownership? And how does the recourse to law, authorship, and property rights enable and inhibit the collective of creators in their pursuit to resist platform extractivism?