Generative AI and the Deterritorialisation of Artistic Practice
I believe the advent of generative AI presents a paradigmatic shift in artistic creation that bears philosophical parallels to photography's historical impact on painting.
Photography freed painters from the burden of precise and literal representation.
As Edward Weston prophetically wrote in 1930:
Photography has or will eventually, negate much painting-for which the painter should be deeply grateful; relieving him, as it were, from certain public demands: representation, and objective seeing. Freed by photography from the drudgery of faithful representation, painting could pursue a higher task: abstraction.
This liberation went far beyond simply relieving artists of their role as documentarians. Painters were compelled to interrogate the very nature of meaningful representation, transcending surface-level mimesis to explore the interpretative dimensions of perception itself.
They began exploring not just the visible but the visible's relationship to consciousness, emotion, and temporal experience. This opened the door to movements like Impressionism, which explored the fleeting movements of light; Cubism, which reimagined form and perspective; and Surrealism, which tapped into the subconscious and the irrational.
The question shifted from "what do we see?" to "how do we see?" and ultimately to "what makes seeing meaningful?”. In this way, photography not only shifted the method, but also the purpose of art.
The new artistic liberation
Today, Generative AI introduces a novel dialectical relationship between artist and medium, where creative expression emerges through human intention and computational emergence. For generative AI art, the equivalent shift won’t be about creating images, but about guiding and curating the creative process itself.
That’s profound. In traditional artistic practice, the artist maintained direct control over the material manifestation of their vision—a brushstroke, line, or compositional choice flows directly from artist to medium. The creative process is largely linear: conception → execution → refinement.
With generative AI, this linear relationship transforms into a dialogic process. This process is analogous to a conductor interpreting a musical score, a curator arranging elements in a space, and a director guiding actors through a scene. Selection becomes a primary creative act, where the artist must evaluate outputs against their vision, recognise promising deviations, identify variations suggesting new directions, understand relationships between outputs, and decide which generations merit further exploration. The prompt becomes a form of meta-creation that guides the AI's generative capabilities.
Generative AI transforms the artist into an intertextual mediator.
This process reveals layers of interpretation, which may include but are not limited to the:
linguistic layer (where words become visual or auditory expressions),
conceptual layer (how the AI interprets and combines ideas),
aesthetic layer (how visual elements manifest/interact)
emergent layer (dealing with unexpected combinations and results)
meta layer (what the process reveals about human and machine creativity)
The deterritorialisation of creativity and ‘generative dialectics’
Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas, generative AI can be understood not as a tool for reproduction but as a “machine for difference”—a mechanism that reshapes creativity. This reshaping, or deterritorialisation, dissolves fixed creative boundaries and leads to new formations of thought, perception, and aesthetic experience. The creative process becomes an exploration of the “plane of immanence”—a field of pure potential where forms avoid finality in favour of continual transformation. Each generated iteration isn’t an endpoint but a point within an endless network of possibilities (weights, layers, data, etc.).
This new paradigm introduces a dynamic that could be called a “generative dialectic.” Here, the artist’s role shifts from creator to orchestrator of possibilities; the artwork becomes a site of ongoing emergence, and meaning arises not from a single authorial intent but from the interaction between human direction and AI’s latent capabilities.
Toward a New Aesthetic Praxis
Nowadays, everyone can write a prompt to generate an AI image, just as everyone has a camera on their phone with which to take pictures. However, those who manage to raise photography to the level of art combine established aesthetic values with entirely new skills. They combine a knowledge of composition, perspective, and a keen, perceptive eye with an understanding of camera technology and its settings, as well as exploration, curiosity, and imagination in choosing what to photograph.
Similarly, those who aim to elevate AI-generated visuals to the level of art will need to blend aesthetic talent with a wide skill set. This would include:
Classical aesthetic principles and their contemporary reinterpretations
The technological infrastructure of AI systems and manipulating their underlying logic
The philosophical implications of distributed creativity
The curatorial wisdom to recognise emergent patterns and meanings
The ability to sustain creative tension between human and machine agency
The future of art lies not in the supremacy of either human or machine creativity but in the wise navigation of their dialectical relationship. In this light, generative AI represents the reconceptualisation of artistic creation. As a mediator of potentialities, the artist guides the emergence of new aesthetic experiences that could not exist through human or machine agency alone.
Let’s not squander it on trivial Images either could create alone.