I spoke this week at the University of Malta conference Vanishing Acts: AI, Performative Knowledge, Sustainable Memory. The conference asked the right question at the right time: what happens to performance, memory, authorship, and embodied knowledge when Artificial Intelligence enters the creative field?
It was a rich setting in which to think. The event brought together voices such as Susan Kozel, Professor at the Malmö University, whose work sits at the intersection of dance, philosophy, and responsive digital technologies; Christopher Salter, Professor for Immersive Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts; Rebecca Fiebrink, Professor of Creative Computing at the UAL; and Vanessa Camilleri, Associate Professor at the Department of AI in Malta. And, well, myself.
The official framing of the conference was telling. It did not treat AI as a novelty gadget for the arts. It treated it as a pressure point on authenticity, artistic integrity, cultural memory, and sustainability. That is exactly where the serious conversation now belongs. My own contribution began with what I think is the central ethical shift. The biggest change AI is bringing to artistic and performative work is a shift in agency. We are no longer asking only what a human being creates. We are asking who is really acting, choosing, framing, and deciding. That sounds abstract at first, but it cuts to the heart of art.
Before Agency Became Distributed
For a long time, we have assumed that a creative act can be traced back, however imperfectly, to a recognisable human centre. A playwright chooses. A director frames. A composer decides. Even when art is collaborative, we still tend to imagine a meaningful chain of intention behind the work. We may dispute its interpretation, but we broadly understand where responsibility lives. AI unsettles that picture.
When a choreographer uses a generative system to explore movement possibilities, when a visual artist works through machine generated variation, when a playwright coaxes language out of a model, the final work no longer emerges from one transparent chain of intention. Agency becomes distributed across layers: the artist, the tool, the AI model, the AI training data, the engineer, the institution, the interface, and the incentives built into the system. In philosophical terms, we move from simple agency to distributed agency.
And that matters because ethics depends on agency. If we can no longer say clearly who is acting, then it becomes harder to say who is responsible, whose values are being expressed, and who should answer for the work’s moral or cultural consequences.
This is why the question of AI in art is deeper than copyright and much deeper than efficiency. It is a question about the location of judgement.
The Sedation of Judgement
So is AI an existential threat to the creative act as a human expression?
Yes, but not in the shallow sense that machines now generate images, text, sound, or movement. Art has never been pure in that way and technology has always been a component (Wagner built an entire mechanised theatre for the rendition of his music in 1876). Art has always involved technique, influence, imitation, convention, collaboration, mediation, patronage, and tools. The history of performance is not the history of untouched spontaneity. It is the history of form, discipline, borrowing, and transmission. The real threat, however, is subtler.
AI may gradually sedate judgement. It can make creation easier while making conscience thinner. It can offer the artist output while reducing the struggle, hesitation, discernment, and inward labour through which a work becomes ethically owned. The danger is not that the machine appears in the studio or that digital takes over analogue. The danger is that the artist slowly ceases to be the moral centre of gravity of the work. That is the point at which something serious is lost.
Authenticity as an Ethical Question
In performance, this loss may be especially acute. Performance has always been one of the arts most tied to presence, embodiment, vulnerability, repetition, memory, and the irreducibility of the lived moment. A gesture on stage is not just form… it’s a sort of exposure…. time passing through a body in the way light used to pass through my SLR camera. It is a fragile encounter between intention and risk. That is why the performing arts feel the AI question so sharply. The issue is not merely whether a machine can generate choreography, a voice, a scenographic environment, or a dramatic script. The issue is whether the work still carries the trace of a human being who has wrestled with meaning.
This is where authenticity becomes an ethical question. People increasingly ask: was this made by a person? Does that still matter? And if it matters, why? It matters because art is not only output. Art is relation. We do not encounter a performance merely as arranged stimuli. We encounter it as an expression that may carry a consciousness, a wound, a discipline, a refusal, a memory, a risk. If AI creates instability around authenticity, it is because it creates instability around whether we are still in contact with that depth of presence or merely with a plausible simulation of it.
The antidote, however, is not to reject AI outright. The antidote is the reassertion of human intentionality and judgement.
How the Human Centre Holds
First, the artist must still be able to answer the oldest and hardest questions: why this work, why this form, why this intervention into the world? If those questions disappear, then authorship becomes procedural rather than moral.
Second, AI must be treated as material, not authority. A lighting system does not decide the production. A violin does not decide the sonata. Motion capture does not decide the choreography. In the same way, AI may open formal possibilities, but it must not inherit the burden of meaning. The human creator must remain responsible for selection, emphasis, refusal, and interpretation.
Third, we need to recover the dignity of refusal. One of the most important artistic capacities in an age of generative fluency is the ability to look at an output and say: this is clever, but false. Impressive, but empty. Beautiful, but morally unearned. That act of refusal is not secondary to creativity. It is one of its highest forms. The artist remains free only if fluency does not become authority.
Fourth, we must learn again to value process, not only product. This is especially important in performance, where rehearsal, repetition, failure, breath, timing, and bodily memory are not incidental to the work. They are constitutive of it. If AI culture trains us to care only about deliverables, then we lose sight of what artistic practice is actually for. Art is not just the production of artefacts. It is also the formation of perception, conscience, attention, and presence.
This brings us to a deeper question. Perhaps what AI threatens is not creativity itself, but the disciplines by which creativity becomes humanly meaningful.
That is why the conversation around AI and art cannot be reduced to novelty or productivity. It belongs instead to a larger humanistic argument. What are we protecting when we protect artistic practice? Not only copyright for sure. We are protecting those forms of making through which human beings become more perceptive, more answerable, more alive to one another, and more capable of transforming experience into meaning.
That, to me, is the real line that must hold.
The future of art is not secured by excluding machines, but by ensuring that the human being remains the moral author of meaning.
What must remain human is not every sentence, every brushstroke, every movement phrase, or every sonic texture. What must remain human is the conscience behind the work.
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