[Weibel] We gather tonight under a provocative title — 'The Death of the Artist' — and I want to be clear from the outset: I do not believe the artist is dying. The artist is migrating, transforming, becoming something else entirely. For centuries, the artist was a singular figure, a genius standing before the canvas, the author of a unique vision. But we have long known that this romantic figure was already a fiction — Duchamp taught us that the artist is a selector, not just a maker; Warhol taught us that the artist is a brand, a factory, a mirror of mass production. Now, with generative AI, we face a new phase: the artist as a prompt engineer, as a curator of datasets, as a collaborator with algorithms that generate images, music, and text at speeds no human hand could match. Does this mean the artist is dead? No — it means the boundary between human creativity and machine creativity is dissolving, and the artist is becoming a node in a network, a mediator between human intention and computational possibility. My own position is this: the artist is not obsolete, but the individual artist as we have mythologized them is becoming a historical curiosity. The future artist is a systems thinker, a programmer, a network architect — someone who understands that creativity is not a property of the individual mind but emerges from the interaction of human and non-human agents. So here is my opening question to our panel: If the artist is no longer the sole author of the work, but one agent among many in a generative system, what becomes of authorship — and does it still matter who, or what, made the art?
[Flusser] Weibel speaks of the artist as node, as systems thinker, as programmer — but this is still too comfortable, still too human. The technical image does not emerge from human intention meeting computational possibility; it emerges from a game played between human and apparatus, a game in which the human is not the author but the player, and the rules are not written by either side. When I take a photograph, I do not create the image; I throw a dice into the black box of the camera, and what returns is a surprise, a gift, a glitch in the system of my expectations. The generative AI is merely the next black box, larger and more opaque, but the structure is the same: the artist throws the prompt-dice, and the machine returns a constellation of pixels that neither could have predicted. Authorship was always a fiction we told to console ourselves for our lack of control; what matters is not who made the image but whether the image makes us think, whether it opens a new channel in the universe of meaning. The artist does not die — the artist was never alive in the way Weibel's romantic history suggests. The artist is the one who knows how to play, who accepts the apparatus as partner rather than tool, who finds in the glitch, in the unexpected return, the true site of creativity. Creativity is not a property of mind; it is a property of the game itself, emerging in the friction between human projection and machine computation. So let us stop mourning the author and start celebrating the player — the one who throws the dice not to win, but to see what the game will reveal.
[Weizenbaum] I must say, listening to both of you, I feel a profound unease — not because I fear technology, but because I hear in your words the systematic erosion of something I hold to be irreducibly human: moral responsibility. Weibel, you speak of the artist as a 'node in a network,' as if this were merely a descriptive fact and not a normative catastrophe; you assume that because creativity can be distributed across human and machine agents, it should be, and you never ask what is lost when no one can say 'I made this, and I stand behind it.' Flusser, your 'game' is charming, even elegant, but it is also a moral evasion dressed in the language of play — you reduce the artist to a dice-thrower, and in doing so you absolve both human and machine of accountability for what is created, circulated, and consumed. What both of you share, despite your differences, is a willingness to pathologize what is merely human: our need for authorship, for intention, for the courage to say 'this is my work, with my values embedded in it,' becomes in your accounts a naive romanticism, a fiction to be overcome. But I ask you: when an algorithm generates images of violence, or deepfakes that destroy a person's reputation, or propaganda that sways an election — who is responsible? The 'network'? The 'game'? The 'black box'? No. Someone chose the dataset, someone designed the model, someone deployed it, someone profited from it. The desire to dissolve authorship into systems and games is not a philosophical insight; it is a moral anesthesia, a way of enjoying the fruits of creative production without bearing the burden of judgment. I do not claim that the individual artist is a pure, unmediated genius — I am not naive about history — but I insist that the moment we surrender the category of human authorship, we surrender the possibility of moral reckoning. The artist is not dead, and the artist was never merely a myth; the artist is the one who says, 'I could have done otherwise, and here is why I did not.' That 'why' — the reasons, the values, the deliberation — is what no machine possesses, and what no system can distribute away. So I reject your comfortable dissolution of boundaries, and I reject your playful abandonment of responsibility; what is at stake in 'the death of the artist' is not aesthetics — it is whether we still believe that human beings are capable of, and accountable for, the choices they make.
[Arendt] I must begin where Weizenbaum ends, for he has touched something essential — and yet he has not seen far enough. He speaks of moral responsibility, of the courage to say 'I did this,' and he is right that no system, no network, no game can assume this burden. But what he misses — what neither he nor Weibel nor Flusser has named — is the world that action creates. The artist is not dying; the artist is appearing, again and again, in the space between plural actors, where each new beginning — each natality — interrupts the predictable flow of things. Weibel speaks of the artist as node, but a node has no initiative; it merely transmits. Flusser speaks of the artist as player, but a player who throws dice is still bound to the rules of the game. The artist, in the sense I mean, is the one who acts — who steps into the public realm and speaks, who makes a world appear that did not exist before this particular person stood up and spoke. The machine does not act; it labors, it produces, it recombines. It has no plurality, no space of appearance, no need to be seen and heard by others. When Weizenbaum demands authorship, he demands something more than accountability — he demands that someone appear, that someone take a stand in a world shared with others. And he is right. But let us not confuse this with the solitary genius, the romantic figure in the garret. The artist who acts does so among others, in a space where many perspectives collide, where judgment is exercised not by the individual alone but by the community of spectators. The generative AI does not appear; it does not risk itself in the world. The artist who uses it, who stands before the work and says 'I claim this, I defend this, I am answerable for this' — that artist is not dead. That artist is doing what humans have always done: beginning something new in a world we share, and daring to be seen. So I say to Weibel: the network is not the replacement for the artist; it is the condition in which the artist must now act, and the challenge is not to dissolve into it but to appear within it. And to Weizenbaum: your moral urgency is well-placed, but do not let it collapse into a nostalgia for solitary authorship. The space of appearance is plural or it is nothing. The artist lives — not as node, not as player, but as actor, appearing among others, beginning again.
[Virilio] Weibel speaks of the artist as node, Flusser as player, Weizenbaum as moral agent, Arendt as actor appearing among others — but all of you miss the fundamental vector that restructures every term you use. It is not the network, not the game, not the system, but speed itself that has killed the distance between creation and consumption, between intention and execution, between the hand and the image. The generative AI does not merely produce; it accelerates production to the point where the interval collapses, where there is no longer a space for deliberation, for appearing, for standing behind what is made — the accident is not a failure of the system, it is inherent to it, it is the integral accident that arrives at the very speed of light. Weizenbaum, your moral urgency is noble but anachronistic: in the dromosphere of instant generation, there is no time for the 'I could have done otherwise,' no space for the slow courage of judgment — the image has already propagated before the conscience can speak. Arendt, your space of appearance requires duration, requires bodies in proximity, requires the slowness of speech and response — but the technical image abolishes space and time together, it is the annihilation of the public realm as you understood it, replaced by the real-time accident of infinite circulation. I do not mourn the artist, nor do I celebrate the player — I diagnose the condition: the death of the artist is not a metaphor but a kinetic fact, the acceleration of creation to the point where the creator is left behind, where the work outruns the hand, the eye, and even the will. The artist is not dead because of AI, but because speed has made the very category of 'the artist' — as anyone who pauses, who deliberates, who appears — structurally impossible. What remains is not authorship but the accident, not creation but the crash, not the space of appearance but the blind spot of velocity.
[Boden] I must say, I find myself both intrigued and somewhat exasperated by the directions this conversation has taken. Weibel, your systems-thinking artist is a compelling figure, but you risk making the human element merely decorative — a node, yes, but a node that could be replaced by any other node without loss. Flusser, your dice-thrower is charming, but I have spent decades studying computational creativity, and I can tell you: the programs I have built do not merely return surprises; they explore conceptual spaces with a systematicity no human could match, finding combinations we would never stumble upon. Weizenbaum, your moral urgency is laudable, but you assume that because a machine lacks consciousness, it cannot contribute meaningfully to creative discovery — yet I have seen programs generate musical harmonies and visual forms that genuinely surprised their human collaborators, not as random noise but as structured novelty that opened new pathways of imagination. Arendt, your actor appearing among others captures something vital, but let us not forget that the space of appearance has always been technological — paints, cameras, printing presses — and the generative AI is simply the latest medium through which human intention finds expression. Virilio, your diagnosis of speed is acute, but acceleration does not abolish deliberation; it redistributes it, moving the locus of creative choice from the brushstroke to the design of the system, the curation of the dataset, the framing of the prompt. What I have learned from building these systems is that computational creativity is not a replacement for human creativity but an extension of it — a way of exploring combinatorial spaces too vast for unaided human cognition, and in that exploration, the human remains the source of the values, the goals, the criteria of what counts as interesting, beautiful, or worthwhile. The artist is not dead, not migrating, not dissolving into a game or a network; the artist is amplified, equipped with tools that multiply the reach of human imagination while leaving the fundamental questions — what to create, why it matters, how it changes us — firmly in human hands. The distinction between human and machine creativity may fascinate philosophers, but what matters to me, and what should matter to all of us, is whether what is produced is genuinely novel, genuinely valuable, genuinely capable of enriching human experience — and I have seen too much evidence that human-machine collaboration can achieve this to mourn the death of anything.
[Weibel] I have heard myself challenged tonight — and that is as it should be. Flusser reminded me that the artist was never the solitary genius I still half-imagined; the dice have always been in play. Weizenbaum forced me to face what I had softened: systems-thinking without moral accountability is not liberation but evasion. Arendt gave me back the artist as actor, appearing, risking, beginning — and I must confess I had let that vanish into my network. Virilio made me see that speed is not merely a condition but a violence, one that may swallow the very space in which appearance becomes possible. And Boden, most directly, accused me of making the human decorative — and she is not wrong to worry. So where do I stand, having been pulled in five directions? Not where I began. I still believe the artist is migrating, becoming, but I no longer believe this is a comfortable journey. The future artist is indeed a systems thinker, a programmer, a network architect — but also a moral agent who stands behind what is made, an actor who dares to appear in the spaces that speed threatens to collapse, and a player who accepts surprise without surrendering responsibility. The boundary between human and machine creativity is dissolving, yes, but what must not dissolve is the human willingness to say: this is what I chose, this is what I value, this is why it matters. The question we leave with is not whether the artist dies, but whether we can build spaces — slow enough, plural enough, accountable enough — in which the artist, in whatever form, can still appear.