Paolo Dalprato
Hybrid Creativity¶
Author and Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines¶
PREFACE BY ATHOS BONCOMPAGNI
WITH A CONTRIBUTION BY SIMONE ALIPRANDI
Published: February 2025
!!! note on the license: this essay is released under a Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 4.0 license, different from the CC BY-NC 4.0 license used for other content on this site.
The volume is available in Open Access and can be purchased in ePub and print editions from Ledizioni (Italian only).
Note on this edition
This is an English translation of Creatività ibrida, originally published in Italian in February 2025. The essay examines authorship and creativity in the age of generative AI, drawing on case law and regulations from multiple jurisdictions including the United States, China, and the European Union.
Preface by Athos Boncompagni¶
For several years now, Paolo has been regularly and dedicatedly informing us through his blog and Facebook page about all the wonders and incredible innovations that AI unveils to the world almost daily. This book, in my view, is a kind of obligatory act, a reasoned summary of an important aspect of what constantly rushes past us, of which we can only grasp a small part, concerning the highly varied world of generative artificial intelligences in the field of images: namely, the aspect of work authorship.
Looking around when AI first blossomed (we're talking about a couple of years ago or a little more), I unfortunately didn't see young people enthusiastically climbing aboard the innovation train first. And this was strange because throughout my entire previous experience, not just professionally, the first enthusiasts of revolutionary new technology have always been the youngest—those who hadn't yet had time to accumulate experience and weren't willing to spend decades building it, perhaps those in a hurry, those who were more ignorant but at the same time more interested in new ways of achieving things that in the past could only be obtained through effort and sacrifice, sometimes extraordinary.
A lesson history teaches us is precisely this: the thought that there might be an alternative way to achieve the same results has always captivated the most open, active, and creative minds—in other words, young minds. And in the end, this has never led them to work less but more, or equally, while achieving results incomparable to the past, both in quantity and quality.
Unfortunately, when AI began to show its capabilities, we instead witnessed the sad spectacle of many young people who not only didn't consider it for what it's worth but didn't even want to know about it. Closed in a world of absolutes where art resides in the manual gesture rather than in the intellect and creative idea, we witnessed continuous defamation of both AI and those who use it.
Following this spectacle (unprecedented for me), both I and many others decided to fight the battle of information and the defense of creativity against all the obscurantist forces that would like to see AI disappear as thieves of content, jobs, ideas, and other uncontrolled nonsense.
For this reason, the work of people like Paolo Dalprato has proven precious and unique precisely for his incessant debunking of all the daily ignorance dispensed by self-proclaimed "artists" who speak on behalf of all art and who tirelessly strive to stop AI in every possible field. The most dangerous of all: the legal and regulatory field. A discipline in which AI could be seriously slowed down and denied to many creatives in favor of a minority who prefer Luddism to progress.
At the origins of this wave of "mental medievalism" is certainly the crisis that the very presence of AI has caused for the authorial figure. It's no coincidence that Paolo decided to focus his work in this direction. AI is proving capable of excellently substituting much "craft" and many intermediate phases in creating a work. This, as I said, has not received applause from those who until today have been forced to spend their life's time in the various construction processes of the work itself but have felt their role called into question.
Hence the need to redefine, in a manner consistent with the possibilities offered by technology, the role of the author. That is, of the one who must not so much take charge of realizing the work but of its creation. Where creation means its ideation, its conception, its definition and its meaning, and where realization means instead its giving form. Its physical or digital construction.
And to achieve all this, it's also necessary to have a clear understanding of what all these steps mean and why it's extremely important never to confuse one's authorial will with random work. That is, not to confuse: where the value of a work lies and where creativity lies in its journey.
If we become, today more than before, and thanks precisely to AI, prepared designers, we will never be able to avoid seeking in the necessary steps from ideation to realization of a work a possible resolution to the problems that will be posed to us in any working scenario.
If instead we act randomly, we run the risk of never producing any work suitable to satisfy any request in the real world. And AI (or any other tool) cannot perform this role in our place.
Today the question of what it means to have created and how we have (conceptually more than materially) created becomes mandatory precisely for anyone who is creative or deals with creativity, precisely thanks to the appearance of AI on the creativity scene.
This book sets out the facts in a lean and precise manner and proposes its summary analysis that helps this task of redefinition and mental clarification not a little.
The aim is that the author, approaching the tools of creation, does so with greater awareness than in the past, with awareness of the importance and irreplaceability of their role and their work.
It's a mandatory step if we want to explain to our students, today and especially tomorrow, how important the culture of design is in every creative action and how important it is for the creatives of the future so they can always be fully aware of the enormous powers given to them today.
A reading, therefore, that I consider almost mandatory to begin seriously reflecting on one's authorial figure and learning to recognize creativity and the presence of the author in the results shown to us, regardless of the means by which these works were created.
Learning to differentiate between the two things and to understand what we are and what our role is, is the first step to allow us to be better and more prepared authors and with this awareness to use even the next, new, unthinkable tools that technology will one day allow us to have, both us and those who come after us.
Preface by Simone Aliprandi¶
From Greek techne to generative artificial intelligence: the fascinating evolution of the concept of creativity
I first met Paolo Dalprato during a very interesting event organized by the Politecnico delle Arti e del Design di Firenze and ISIA Firenze, where I have been teaching since 2018, entitled Delle Arti e nuove intelligenze (On Arts and New Intelligences). On March 23, 2023, on the stage of the historic Teatro Niccolini, I witnessed a stimulating exchange between theorists and professionals from the creative world who passionately shared their experience with new technologies based on generative artificial intelligence, recounting how their role as authors and artists was profoundly changing in this new technological scenario.
At that time, I was beginning to write my book L'autore artificiale. Creatività e proprietà intellettuale nell'era dell'AI (The Artificial Author: Creativity and Intellectual Property in the AI Era), which would be published the following June by Ledizioni in this same series, and seeing Paolo present on stage emblematic cases of "synthographies" created by photographers who had "lent themselves" to the world of digital creativity opened new horizons for me, offering precious and concrete insights for my writings and university lectures. From this fortunate encounter came almost spontaneously the proposal to Paolo to create the cover images for my book. Images that I still use today as an emblematic case study to respond to the now classic criticism: "but with artificial intelligence everyone can make images!"
It's actually a rather senseless criticism: if it were really that simple, instead of turning to a creativity professional like Paolo, I could have simply experimented with prompts myself and derived something of my own. I am absolutely certain that the result would have been completely different and certainly not up to par.
In any case, beyond having met Paolo, that day in Florence was truly enlightening for me on multiple fronts: all the speakers were able to precisely identify the crucial nodes of the "artificial creativity" theme, and the various sessions had been masterfully structured to generate that constructive dialogue and ferment of ideas necessary to address such complex and innovative topics. It's no coincidence that many of the reflections I later developed in the book, particularly in the first chapter, began to take shape precisely while attending the lively debate on March 23rd. It was evident that the paradigm was changing radically and experts from the creative world were demonstrating to the audience present how the creative act was now profoundly and inevitably interconnected with technology in multiple areas of artistic and cultural production.
The ancient Greeks used the word techne to express the concept of "art," wisely associating it with the concepts of "skill," "know-how," "creative competence." Many centuries later, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Anglo-American legal doctrine on copyright developed a fundamental theory according to which a work can be defined as authentically creative when three elements emerge in its creation: skill, labour, judgement, that is, competence, effort (or toil), choice. Here we find, surprisingly current, the echo of the ancient Greeks' "creative competence": the ability to choose the most suitable chisel to forge marble, the art of skillfully mixing oil colors to spread them effectively on canvas, the expertise in harmoniously orchestrating instrumental parts to compose an engaging symphony.
It was in the twentieth century, or perhaps already in the last decades of the nineteenth, that in the creative field the ancestral concept of techne became increasingly intertwined with the modern concept of "technology." Innovative forms of creativity emerged that cannot do without technological support: from photography, with its revolutionary mechanical processes (think of the fundamental judicial case of the photo of Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony, widely cited in this book), to digital graphics and electronic music, up to our times, times in which the vast majority of creativity is necessarily expressed through software and algorithms.
Today, with the exception of the most traditional arts such as sculpture, painting, and choreographic art, all creative forms transit, in whole or in part, through digital procedures: writing in all its forms, contemporary musical composition, photography, cinematography, advertising and editorial graphics, industrial design, interface and service design, architecture, software development. These activities take place predominantly through computers or other increasingly evolved digital devices (tablets, professional cameras, latest-generation smartphones), using specific and highly specialized software.
In the last two or three years, however, we have taken a further significant step, decisively entering a new technological and creative era. Generative artificial intelligence systems no longer represent simple passive tools in the hands of authors but assume an increasingly complementary and surprisingly propositional role. Starting from human input, these systems are able to elaborate innovative and completely unexpected solutions, opening previously unimaginable creative scenarios.
The creative process still remains initiated and controlled by the human being, but a significant part of skill and labour is assumed by artificial intelligence. The human being undoubtedly retains the judgement: the fundamental creative choices on the input to provide and on the accurate selection of the output to publish and disseminate as a finished work. The human being precisely determines the direction of the generative process and evaluates with artistic sensitivity when the result obtained fully corresponds to their creative needs, deciding the opportune moment of its "crystallization" into a work that can be enjoyed by the public. Competence transforms and adapts to the new paradigm: the traditional skills specific to each artistic form are no longer exclusively required, but the importance of fine tuning the AI system emerges powerfully. Conscious choice (judgement) becomes the indispensable cornerstone of the new creativity, allowing authors to proudly say "I created this with artificial intelligence" instead of passively saying "this was generated by artificial intelligence."
Of course, all this makes sense and remains valid only if the human user truly takes a creative attitude; and it certainly doesn't happen in all those cases where we lazily let the machine do it, we settle for the first result offered to us, perhaps using pre-packaged prompts.
However, it cannot be denied that, in this complex and rapidly evolving scenario, the role of the author undergoes a radical and profound transformation, so much so that numerous copyright scholars find themselves in serious difficulty in defining adequate new interpretive paradigms. Traditional copyright law, born in the eighteenth century in the era of literature, painting, and symphonic music, founded on the essential assumption that the author is necessarily a human being, today shows obvious conceptual and applicative limits. How can a markedly "anthropocentric" legal institution adapt to a world in which creativity is deeply intertwined with technology and in which there is increasingly insistent talk of an author "hybridized with the machine"?
The legal world will inevitably need its physiological time to develop adequate responses to these challenges, and it will be my commitment to constantly update the interested public on these developments. In the meantime, it appears fundamental to develop a thorough and systematic reflection on the role of the author and its rapid evolution in this new technological revolution, which already from its very beginnings shows us the extraordinary speed of the changes underway and those to come. Can we already begin to speak concretely of a "hybrid author" or a "meta author," as some visionary thinkers have begun to suggest?
It is precisely in this ideal furrow that Paolo Dalprato's acute reflections fit, presented with clarity in these pages and in the numerous videos of meetings and seminars that he has held individually and that we have had the pleasure of sharing in recent months. I consider these reflections a natural and precious continuation or, better still, an interesting dialogic counterpoint to the considerations that I have personally developed in the first chapter of L'autore artificiale (Ledizioni, 2023), in the third chapter of Il design nell'era della creatività artificiale (Ledizioni, 2024), and in the various articles and interviews published in the last two years. In this case, however, we have the privileged perspective of a creativity professional, in particular of graphic and photographic creativity: a necessarily different point of view from mine and, precisely because of this difference, a source of cultural enrichment and precious stimulus for further research for all those who share an open and curious approach to these phenomena.
Simone Aliprandi, in addition to being the founder and coordinator of this book series, is a lawyer and university lecturer who constantly carries out consulting, training, and outreach activities in the field of intellectual property law and digital technology law. Website: www.aliprandi.org.