How Artists Use AI as a Responsive Material for Art Creation

This paper investigates how artists integrate artificial intelligence into their creative practices, using Material Engagement Theory (MET) as an analytical framework. MET provides a lens through which AI can be understood as a responsive material that actively contributes to the artistic processes. Through an analysis of 18 eminent artists’ practices in which AI is structurally used, we explore four key MET concepts: radical continuity, creative thinging, enactive discovery, and attentive unity. This approach allows us to examine AI as an active material within a co-creative process, where artists and AI discover and use each other’s affordances, thus reaching a state of unity and co-agency. AI's capacity for unexpected outputs emerges as a central feature of the co-creative process, with artists leveraging serendipity to reveal novel artistic directions. This research contributes to understanding AI’s evolving role in art, positioning MET as a valuable framework for examining the intersection between serendipity, co-agency, and materiality within the co-creative process. By acknowledging AI as a responsive material, this study reveals new directions for exploring the co-creative processes underlying AI use in art.