More than we can make: generative AI, artistic forms, and artistic becoming

Abstract Debates surrounding generative AI and creativity have largely focused on artifacts: who or what produced a given image or text, whether machine outputs qualify as art, and how authorship and value should be understood. Drawing on aesthetics, craft theory, anthropology, human–computer interaction, hybrid craft, digital fabrication, and rematerialization, this article argues that art has historically involved two intertwined dimensions. Artistic forms stabilize and transmit meaning through artifacts, whereas artistic becoming refers to the developmental and transformative processes through which new possibilities of perception, interpretation, and experience emerge, in makers, in recipients, and in cultures. The article’s central claim is a decoupling thesis: for most of history these dimensions were contingently coupled, since producing sophisticated forms required the maker’s becoming, and generative AI loosens this coupling by enabling such forms to emerge without the specific developmental pathways that traditionally conditioned them. Rather than signaling the disappearance of creativity, the decoupling relocates to new sites and makes visible dimensions of artistic practice that the demands of production long obscured. The article situates generative AI within a longer history of hybridization and distributed creativity, develops the decoupling thesis across these three levels, and defends a normative orientation: under conditions of symbolic abundance, the creative practices most worth pursuing are those that route generative fluency back into embodied, situated experience.