Automating Remix: Generative AI, Creative Labor, and the Decay of Aura

• In Event: 30216 - Emerging Work Practices in the Age of AI

Abstract

Widespread adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has prompted researchers to
re-evaluate human-machine interactions in creative labor. While the assumption in new media
literature is that GenAI will transform but not replace human creativity, this prediction overlooks
the historical precarity of creative work. We examine GenAI by contextualizing it as technology
that accelerates two longstanding capitalist trends. First, GenAI intensifies distantiation—the
process by which representational technologies introduce physical distance between creators,
artifacts, and audiences—further eroding what Benjamin refers to as "aura." Second, GenAI
automates remix practices by drawing from vast datasets of human creative outputs to generate
derivative content. Though GenAI is a new technology, the zeitgeist surrounding it obscures
these longstanding trends. We argue that GenAI represents capitalism's continuation of task
automation, hyper-accelerating both distantiation and remix while potentially intensifying the
precarity of creative labor as efficiency is prioritized over human creative work.

Authors

• Jared T Jensen, University of Texas at Austin

• Dhiraj Murthy, University of Texas at Austin

• Samuel Baker, University of Texas at Austin