The digital palette of the future: the evolution of the artist’s role in the era of neural networks

Abstract

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into the visual arts has ushered in a new era, comparable in scale to the invention of photography in the 19th century. Technologies based on diffusion model architectures and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have ceased to be merely tools of automation. Today, they act as full-fledged co-creators, radically reshaping the landscape of digital creativity. This paper is dedicated to exploring the transformation of the artist’s identity: from a creator-executor to a curator of algorithmic processes.