GenAI as a Posthuman Creative Collaborator – Evidence from Artistic Exploration

Artists, like other professionals, engage with Generative AI (GenAI) technologies to support their creative practice. While much of this engagement is task-oriented and situated within concerns around environmental impact, intellectual property rights and work displacement, emerging experiences suggest the transformational potential of a collaborative relationship. By drawing on a posthuman lens and employing an interventionist approach, we explore the potentiality of an entangled, collaborative, reciprocal human-GenAI interaction in the creative process. We develop a conceptual framework that illustrates how agency is distributed in human-GenAI collaborations, as artists engage with GenAI across a continuum, from using GenAI as a basic tool to working with GenAI as a directed and symbiotic collaborative partner. Our findings contribute to the human-GenAI collaboration literature by extending traditional tool-centric conceptions and proposing a relational understanding of creativity, where agency is shared between human and non-human actors. Furthermore, this study draws out implications for individual creatives, managers seeking to lift organizational creativity, and for GenAI technology providers shaping the future of human-GenAI collaboration.