Collective Agency in Art-making: Towards Community-centric Design of Text-to-Image (T2I) AI Tools

Text-to-image (T2I) AI tools are trained on vast datasets of existing images and artworks. We identify that existing ethical standards and regulatory safeguards for these tools largely lie within the Western neoliberal realm. They assume that artistic creativity originates from individuals rather than in collectives or social environments, ownership is an individual concern rather than shaped by communities and shared cultural traditions, and compensation should be based on individual claims rather than acknowledging collective contributions to artistic knowledge. In this paper, we counter these assumptions by theorizing ‘collective agency’ as a critical conceptual lens to rethink artists’ community-centric roles in relation to these tools. Drawing from our nine-month-long qualitative interventions with diverse Bangladeshi artist groups, we find that these artists manifest cultural resonance, co-creation, and sense of recognition through their art-making practices which fosters collective agency among them. This empirically grounded account of collective agency in our study posits practical design and policy implications, such as incorporating artists’ solidarity, community-centric data stewardship, and collective bargaining mechanisms in ethical development of T2I AI tools to reclaim artists' control over their creative practices in the AI age.