Tears and rain – AI and authorship: Challenging concepts of the unique through unauthored rarity

This article explores the evolving nature of authorship and meaning-making in illustration against the backdrop of artificial intelligence (AI)-generative art technologies and image saturation. Moving beyond surface debates around AI obsolescence, it aims to reframe discourse through an interdisciplinary lens of theory, visual culture and futurism. The central hypothesis posits that in our eagerness to declare authorial intent’s ‘death’, we may have failed to recognize how meaning has migrated rather than disappeared. By synthesizing postmodern theory with an altermodernist framework, specifically through the combination of Frederic Jameson’s ‘schizophrenic’ visual culture with Nicolaus Bourriaud’s concept of the ‘Semionaut’. The article claims that authorial significance has shifted into uncharted territories we remain blind to – with critical repercussions for illustrators’ roles as cultural curators, in an era where users of AI can infinitely generate ‘unique’ images of high quality without any illustrative ability. Perhaps the true value for illustrative arts lies in cultivating ‘rareness’ – contextually embedded artefacts imbued with intention that cut through visual noise. This pivot has profound implications for professional practice, ethics and training. The article aims to initiate new dialogues examining these future-facing considerations. This scholarly inquiry emerges from over a decade of critically investigating impacts of computational advances on image production and reception to identify the hidden impact of postmodernism as it accelerates through new technical abilities provided by AI to suggest new authorial mutations.