Automating remix: generative AI, creative labor, and the decay of aura

The widespread adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence Technology (GenAI) is prompting researchers to re-evaluate the relationship between technology and human creativity. While the pervading assumption is that GenAI will transform and not replace human creativity, this prediction overlooks the longstanding disempowerment of many creative workers in technological assemblages. We examine GenAI by contextualizing it as technology that accelerates and newly interarticulates two continuing capitalist trends. First, GenAI intensifies distantiation – the process by which representational technologies introduce physical distance between creators, artifacts, and audiences – eroding the unique quality of presence Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘aura.’ Second, GenAI automates remix practices, deriving its content from already increasingly varied datasets of human creative outputs. Though GenAI is a new technology, the zeitgeist surrounding it obscures how it contributes to these ongoing processes. We argue that when GenAI continues task automation by hyper-accelerating both distantiation and remix, it also intensifies the precarity of creative labor by prioritizing hyper-efficiency over human creative work.