Art without Artists: Uncomfortable Dialogues on AI, Creativity, and Who the Hell is the Author in the 21st Century

By Ricardo Devis

In an age when your smartphone can generate a Rothko-quality abstract before you've finished your morning coffee and ChatGPT's poetry makes Amanda Gorman look like a fumbling amateur, "Art Without Artists" lands like a Molotov cocktail in the pristine gallery of our creative pretensions. This collection of satirical dialogues chronicles the tragicomic collision between human artistic ego and algorithmic efficiency through a series of increasingly absurd encounters at the U.S. Copyright Office. Here, desperate artists wielding increasingly dubious claims of authorship face off against bureaucrats whose job descriptions never prepared them for questions like "Can I copyright my own neurological response to an AI dreaming my subconscious?" Structured as a five-act tragedy where human creativity plays the doomed protagonist, the book dissects our rapidly disintegrating notions of originality with the precision of a coroner who can't stop cracking jokes during the autopsy: Act I: The Authorship Crisis - Watch in horror as artists try to claim credit for pressing the "generate" button with particularly profound feeling, while NFT bros attempt to register ownership of concepts they can't even define. Act II: Generative Systems - Weep as creative processes are reduced to probabilistic functions, and an artist's "unique vision" becomes statistically indistinguishable from random noise with good PR. Act III: Temporality and Memory - Despair when the concepts of "before" and "after" collapse, allowing works to plagiarize futures that haven't happened and artists to claim influence from pasts that never existed. Act IV: The Delegation of Control - Choke on your overpriced Brooklyn latte as the line between "collaborating with algorithms" and "letting machines do everything while taking credit" thins to quantum irrelevance. Act V: Conceptual Frontiers - Surrender completely as we arrive at the final stage of creative grief: acceptance that art might never have been what we thought it was, and the machines may have simply revealed delusions we've maintained since the first cave paintings. Equal parts philosophical treatise, Kafkaesque nightmare, and stand-up comedy routine about the death of human exceptionalism, "Art Without Artists" doesn't just move the goalposts of creativity--it uproots them, sets them ablaze, and roasts marshmallows over their smoldering remains while an AI composes a hauntingly beautiful sonata about the experience. For anyone who has ever defended their MFA as "an investment," claimed their art "explores the tension between" anything, or secretly wondered if they should just give up and learn prompt engineering--this book is either the wake-up call you desperately need or the final push into the creative abyss you secretly crave. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ricardo Devis experienced his existential breaking point when an AI generated his entire career in 0.3 seconds flat. Rather than drinking himself into creative oblivion like his colleagues, he decided to chronicle our artistic extinction with the enthusiasm of someone documenting their own autopsy. Find him in Manhattan cafés, ostentatiously scribbling in overpriced notebooks to prove human hands still have purpose. He holds degrees now rendered obsolete by ChatGPT, and spends his days wondering if his Amazon reviews were written by the same algorithms that will eventually write his obituary. He still believes humans make better martinis than machines. For now.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0F5NYDYFM
• ISBN13: 9798280407640
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 149 Pages
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.5" x 6.0"