Is AI really stealing from artists? The uncomfortable truth about originality in art

The Ghost in the Archive: Art after AI

The anxiety around AI in art arrives wrapped in the language of theft. Artists speak of extraction. Lawyers speak of infringement. Big tech speaks of innovation. Somewhere in between sits a deeper, older question: Has art ever been made in isolation? Rahul Bhattacharya answers.

The image of the solitary artistic genius has always depended on selective memory. Art history is full of borrowing, citation, adaptation, translation, and return. Images travel. Forms migrate. Styles accumulate through repetition. Entire movements emerge through the reworking of earlier forms. This becomes especially visible in Indian contemporary art, where many artists have long worked through unstable authorship, layered archives, inherited visual languages, and fragmented cultural memory. Their practices already disturb the clean boundaries that current AI debates attempt to defend.

The artist is dead

Pushpamala N’s staged photographic works operate through performance, citation, masquerade, and reconstruction. Her images borrow from ethnographic photography, popular cinema, devotional imagery, studio portraiture, and colonial classification systems. Yet the work does not imitate these histories passively. It bends them back towards the viewer. The artist becomes actor, archive, stereotype, historian, and interruption at once. The “original” image dissolves into a chain of references. Authorship becomes theatrical rather than singular.


A similar instability appears in the work of Raqs Media Collective. Their installations, films, texts, and archival interventions move through memory, surveillance, labour, and technology. The collective form itself matters here. The author already exists as a plurality. Meaning emerges through circulation, conversation, and assemblage. Their work treats archives not as stable repositories of truth but as living systems where histories remain incomplete, contested, and in motion.

Artificial intelligence inherits this human condition. Large image models do not invent in isolation. They absorb patterns across vast visual archives and generate outputs through statistical relationships between forms, textures, compositions, and language. The process sounds alien until one remembers how deeply human visual culture already depends on accumulated references.

An art student in Baroda studies Tyeb Mehta, Francis Bacon, Amar Chitra Katha, cinema posters, miniature painting, advertising, gaming environments, and Instagram aesthetics at once. A designer in Bengaluru might reference Japanese minimalism, Swiss grids, Dravidian typography, gaming interfaces, and Malayalam film titles in the same project. Contemporary visual production already operates through layered datasets. AI merely renders the mechanism visible. That visibility produces discomfort because it unsettles the romantic aura around originality.

The debate around AI-generated imagery assumes machines only imitate while humans create. The distinction feels reassuring but historically fragile. Picasso absorbed Iberian sculpture and African masks. Warhol reproduced publicity photographs and supermarket packaging. Closer home, artists such as Atul Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, and Shilpa Gupta move across citation, mediation, political memory, and audience participation with little interest in singular authorship. None of this reduces creativity. It reveals how creativity often works: through relation.

Large image models absorb patterns from visual archives and generate through statistical relationships. The process sounds alien until one remembers how deeply visual culture already depends on accumulated references.

There are many authors

Prompting enters a longer artistic history than current AI debates acknowledge. Many contemporary artists have worked through instruction, delegation, fabrication, and distributed production for decades. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings were executed through written directives by assistants. Ai Weiwei’s installations emerge through networks of artisans, ceramic workers, architects, and fabricators. Subodh Gupta’s monumental works depend on welding teams, casting systems, polishing units, transport infrastructures, and studio coordination.

In each of these cases, the artist does not disappear because others execute the work. Authorship shifts towards orchestration, selection, framing, direction, and conceptual structure. Prompting within AI systems begins to resemble this condition. The prompt becomes less a command to a machine than an instruction-based negotiation with a computational collaborator.

The AI debate therefore exposes less about machines than about our selective understanding of authorship. The anxiety intensifies because algorithms now participate in territories previously protected as human: imagination, aesthetics, style, narrative, and emotional resonance.

Yet audiences continue to respond emotionally to machine-generated works. A viewer standing before an AI-assisted moving image installation may still experience melancholy, awe, discomfort, or tenderness. The encounter remains real even when authorship is distributed across datasets, interfaces, prompts, curatorial choices, and computational systems.

Roland Barthes anticipated this shift long before machine learning entered public consciousness. In “The Death of the Author”, he argued that meaning does not arrive fully formed from the creator. It emerges through reading. The viewer completes the work. Contemporary AI intensifies this condition because the origin point itself becomes unstable. The author fractures into engineers, datasets, interfaces, prompts, historical references, and audiences.

Whose art is it anyway?

Indian contemporary art offers a fertile context for thinking through this instability because the region’s visual cultures have always negotiated plurality. Devotional imagery, craft traditions, cinema hoardings, calendar art, political posters, miniature painting, and folk forms coexist within everyday visual life. High and low categories collapse constantly. Images move between ritual, commerce, protest, intimacy, and spectacle with extraordinary fluidity.

Consider the recent experiments where AI-generated alpona patterns appeared in public festival spaces in Kolkata. Here, machine-generated motifs derived from Bengali decorative traditions entered a living cultural ecosystem before being physically repainted by human artists on streets and public grounds. Who becomes the author in such a situation? The programmer? The dataset? The artisan repainting the form? The tradition itself? The answer resists singularity.

The question becomes more layered when one considers labour. Artificial intelligence is discussed as abstraction, yet it rests on material infrastructures: data centres, energy systems, annotation workers, cloud architectures, platform monopolies, and invisible human maintenance. Art history offers useful tools here because it already understands that images are never only images. They are also products of patronage, labour, circulation, technology, and institutional power.

A Mughal miniature depended on ateliers and collective production. Early studio photography in India depended on assistants, painters, chemical workers, and print technicians. Cinema emerged through collaborative systems. Contemporary AI-generated art arrives through similarly distributed infrastructures. The myth of solitary creation has always concealed labour.

This does not dissolve ethical questions around copyright or consent. Those concerns remain serious. Artists deserve transparency around how their works enter training datasets. Questions of attribution, compensation, and cultural extraction require rigorous frameworks. Indigenous and vernacular image traditions remain especially vulnerable to appropriation under platform capitalism. Yet these conversations become sharper when we move beyond panic and examine the longer history of artistic production itself.

What is original?

The deeper challenge presented by AI is philosophical rather than merely technical. It asks whether originality was ever as pure as modern culture claimed. It asks whether meaning depends entirely on intentionality. It asks whether creativity belongs exclusively to isolated individuals or whether it emerges through networks of relation, memory, influence, and recombination.

Indian contemporary art has been exploring these questions for decades. Nalini Malani’s shadow plays layer mythology, violence, feminist critique, migration, and memory through overlapping projections and fractured narratives. Raqs Media Collective treats archives as unstable fields of circulation. Pushpamala N performs identity as constructed citation. Shilpa Gupta turns language and borders into participatory systems where audiences complete meaning through presence.

These artists matter because they reposition the AI debate away from technological novelty and towards older questions of representation, authorship, and power. AI changes scale, speed, and accessibility. It changes how quickly images can be generated, circulated, and recombined. It changes the economics of production. Yet the underlying questions remain deeply art historical.

The ghost of the author

AI places the ghost of the author directly before us. That visibility allows us to see artistic production less as isolated genius and more as an ecology of relations. Images carry histories, references, infrastructures, and collective memory within them. Creativity becomes less about purity and more about attention to context, labour, ethics, material systems, and the histories embedded within visual culture.

Indian contemporary art already offers a vocabulary for navigating this terrain because it has long understood that images rarely belong to a single moment, medium, or maker. The author was never fully singular. AI simply leaves traces of that ghost more visibly across the surface.

The author is a designer, art historian, and educator. Views expressed are personal.

Feature Interview: Inside the Artist's Studio — SHILPA GUPTA

“The human mind is my favourite tool”

Says the artist who believes we should set our morality aside, and see AI for what it is—just technology. In conversation with Suchismita Ukil

Q&A: You don't like to be recorded.

I am not able to articulate myself as well as I am in my writing.

How would you introduce yourself to a stranger?

Artist, mother, daughter.

How did you start and where you are now?

I joined art school in 1992. The country was just opening to the world. From black and white television we went to nonstop colour channels overnight. Bombay, a migrant city, a city that imagined itself as cosmopolitan was waking up to the nightmare of communal riots following the Babri Masjid demolition. Within a few years, Bombay became Mumbai.

There are some old questions, some new questions. Between looking and seeing and learning and knowing and being told what it is, there are all these filters. Here’s my hand. You put a red filter in front of it and can change the way it looks. Perception is one of the earliest concerns that has continued in my practice.

Numbers, labels, signs, maps, stamps, microphones—things that frame our world—stay with me. An early childhood memory is going through the glossy pages of the World Book Encyclopaedia I had received in eighth grade and stopping to stare at the blue hand stamp squeezed into its margins, every time an India map appeared. It said the boundaries were neither correct nor authentic. The book was published overseas. That was the first trigger. In fact, one of the oldest objects in my studio is a DIY stamp kit. I used it a lot in art school. Maps have often appeared in my work. They are hand drawn and rarely match.

Life took me to border areas. When you look at the nation state from its edges, it looks different from when you’re in a city centre. From here (a metro) the border looks clear, but when you are in, say, Kashmir, it looks different.

I spent a lot of time in the eastern borderlands, where illegal trade is far more than legal trade. That tells you about the relationship between the state and the individual, and how representatives of the state might think differently from the state itself.

When you zoom into something, it blurs. There was an early internet artwork where you could click on my body—I photographed my entire body. The images were so magnified that you couldn’t tell what is what. Distance shapes perception.

That’s a work about body, but then you cut it to lens, take the lens to another, to land. And you’re unable to tell. Works like ‘Blame’—that bottle right there, it’s got simulated blood. If you read the instructions, it tells you to separate the contents by nationality, by religion. I’ve been on trains offering it to people. It raises questions about looking and perception, and the relationship between power, structure, and agency.

What took you to all these places?

Chance. It was the post-art school days where you had a lot of time. One day I found myself in Srinagar. My cousins were also there, and they stayed in the tourist area, and I was visiting a friend in the city. We were hardly far apart in terms of geography, but in terms of experience, it was completely different.

I later made 1:14.9 (2012), a ball of thread wound in the ratio of the length of the fence between India and Pakistan. While researching it, I came across another astonishing figure—over 4,000 kilometres, the length of the India–Bangladesh border, a large part of it already fenced, encircling Bangladesh. Despite that, the illegal trade far exceeded the legal trade. The series of works that emerged explored the relationship between structures of power and everyday life when such porosity persists.

What role does technology play in your work?

Technology has been one of many mediums in my practice because it shapes the way we look at the world. I’ve worked with digital printing, photography, websites, touch screens, and interactive video. In 2006, I created a series of immersive video projections in which visitors interacted with their simulated shadows alongside those of other people and objects. The work explored the unseen world we constantly negotiate, especially in a media-saturated society.

What about artists who use AI and do not disclose it?

There are two parts to that question. One is disclosure, which is a question of morality. Leaving that aside, AI is another medium. Artists will increasingly use it. What matters is what they do with it.

What is your favourite tool?

The human mind. It’s that simple.In the ’90s, I anonymously numbered, stamped, and mailed ink drawings to strangers. There was a drawing on one side, and a stamp on the other that said ‘dispose after use’, along with, say, ‘This is the 160th form I’m mailing. I’ve made 115. I’ll mail 140 more.’ There is somebody before you and somebody after you. And that none of your experiences can be the same. You got this postcard and you didn’t see the artist’s name. Do you think it’s art? Do you keep it? Do you throw it? I posted this out using Jehangir Art Gallery’s mailing list. This was 1995–96.

Which part of the artistic practice is the most rewarding?

The journey of making. Unlike other artists who work within a particular medium, mine keeps changing. So, I often have to begin at the very beginning. Example, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017–18) based on 100 poets who were imprisoned involved months of recording and editing—it was a very slow process. Between writing the proposal and arriving, a project could take two years or more. Listening Air, which began before the pandemic, took even longer as it went through multiple technical challenges.There is a part of the process that is vulnerable, tentative, and often elusive as one moves between research, tests, and daily life. Beneath these mundane acts, another very thin layer hovers. Until suddenly it all comes together. It’s joyful, painful, traumatic—all at once.

Interview Highlight:

"When you look at the nation state from its edges, it looks different from when you’re in a city centre. From here (a metropolitan area) the border looks clear, but when you are, say, in Kashmir, it looks very different."

Artist's shit

The 51st Venice Biennale opened with a large audiovisual installation titled La Merde (The Shit). Made by artist Aline Bouvy for the Luxembourg pavilion, the work uses an anthropomorphic figure to comment on Western society.

Our fascination with the toilet is not new. In contemporary art history, it can be traced back to the dadaist Marcel Duchamp who, with the 1917 readymade sculpture Fountain, gave birth to conceptual art. Piero Manzoni followed with Artist’s Shit in 1961—90 sealed tin cans carrying 30 grams of the artist’s faeces—as a satirical critique of the art community and the cult of the artist’s personality. Each can is valued at over $300,000.

Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture America, an 18-karat gold toilet, is a humorous critique of consumerism and the ultra-wealthy. One edition of the artwork was stolen while on loan. The remaining edition was bought by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for $12 million.

Reader's Block

In a bid to sound smart, and perhaps elevate boring art, contemporary art writing can get dense, if not become entirely off-putting. An academic journal, Philosophy and Literature, ran a contest on bad writing for four years in the 1990s. Art scholar Homi K. Bhabha won the second prize in 1998 for the following passage: "If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to ‘normalise’ formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

— In The Location of Culture, 1994

What did he mean? You be the judge.

Max Ernst

"Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation."

Salvador Dali

"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing."