THE STREET GOT THE MACHINE AI, GRAPHIC DESIGN, CREATIVE CONTROL AND THE NEW DIY REVOLUTION THE PHOTOCOPIER BECAME PHOTOSHOP. PHOTOSHOP BECAME THE PROMPT. THE ARGUMENT ABOUT WHO IS ALLOWED TO CREATE NEVER WENT AWAY. Review by Gordon Lawrence Taylor — DJ Infectious Unease Infectious Unease Radio | Subterranean Zone Radio | Voice In The Void Infectious Unease Radio
AI, GRAPHIC DESIGN, CREATIVE CONTROL AND THE NEW DIY REVOLUTION
THE PHOTOCOPIER BECAME PHOTOSHOP. PHOTOSHOP BECAME THE PROMPT. THE ARGUMENT ABOUT WHO IS ALLOWED TO CREATE NEVER WENT AWAY.
Review by Gordon Lawrence Taylor — DJ Infectious Unease Infectious Unease Radio | Subterranean Zone Radio | Voice In The Void Infectious Unease Radio
There is a deceptively simple question sitting underneath much of the anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence: what is the difference? For decades, musicians, promoters, independent labels, radio presenters, clubs, artists and small businesses have paid graphic designers to produce flyers, posters, advertisements and promotional artwork. The process was familiar: the client supplied the idea, the wording, the atmosphere, the purpose and the audience. They requested the colours, imagery, typography, positioning, mood and marketing direction. The designer interpreted those instructions and returned an image.
Sometimes it was brilliant. Sometimes it was nothing like the picture that existed inside the client’s head. Then came the revisions: move that, change this, make that larger, wrong colour, wrong photograph, wrong atmosphere, start again. The final artwork might have been physically assembled by another person, but nobody seriously suggested that the promoter, musician or client had contributed nothing creatively simply because somebody else operated the design software. So why does the philosophical equation apparently change when the intermediary becomes artificial intelligence?
THE IDEA EXISTED BEFORE THE MACHINE
A professional graphic designer and a generative-AI system are obviously not identical. A skilled designer contributes human judgement, experience, interpretation, technical knowledge and aesthetic intelligence. There are also serious questions surrounding AI training data, copyright, employment, ownership and the economic consequences of automation. Those questions should not be dismissed. But neither do they answer another equally important question: does using AI automatically remove the human creativity that preceded it?
Imagine somebody has an idea for a promotional flyer. They want a decaying industrial landscape, metallic gold lettering, fragments of radio equipment, a dark electronic atmosphere and a particular political undertone. They decide the words, what the image represents, who it is intended to reach and the emotional impact it should create. They generate a version and reject it. They change the instructions, replace elements, rewrite the language, alter the composition and reject another version. Eventually the image begins to resemble what originally existed inside their mind.
Where did the creative process begin? Not inside the machine. It began inside the human imagination. AI participated in the execution.
For years, while organising events, I paid significant amounts of money for promotional artwork. The concepts were often mine. The event identity was mine. The wording was mine. The music was mine. The marketing direction was mine. Yet sometimes, after paying somebody else to interpret those ideas, the finished artwork still did not completely resemble what I had imagined. Had today’s AI systems existed then, I might have possessed considerably greater control over that process. I could have continued changing the work until the visual object came closer to the thing that already existed in my head. That is not necessarily the disappearance of creativity. It can also represent the redistribution of creative control.
WHEN THE INDIVIDUAL ACQUIRES THE TOOLS
This is where the argument becomes much larger than a flyer. Perhaps one of the most culturally significant aspects of generative AI is not that a computer can generate an image. It is that an individual who cannot afford a photographer, graphic designer, advertising agency, copywriter, video-production company and marketing department can suddenly perform elements of all those functions themselves.
That changes the economics of creativity. A multinational corporation can deploy AI across advertising, customer analysis, recommendation systems, optimisation, content production, administration and commercial communication. Technology companies use artificial intelligence throughout enormous digital infrastructures. Governments are adopting AI. Marketing companies are adopting it. Banks, advertising agencies, media organisations and multinational corporations are adopting it because it reduces costs, accelerates production and increases efficiency.
Yet when an independent musician, promoter, writer, broadcaster, artist or small business uses the same technology to perform tasks they previously had to purchase from somebody else, questions of legitimacy suddenly appear. Why? Why should artificial intelligence be considered economically sensible when deployed by a corporation, yet culturally suspicious when used by an individual? Why is automation called innovation inside the corporation but potentially cheating when it reaches the bedroom producer, independent promoter or small organisation?
That contradiction deserves considerably more attention.
TRANSPARENCY — BUT FOR WHOM?
There are legitimate circumstances in which AI disclosure matters. If somebody manufactures a realistic video of a person saying something they never said, fabricates an event, impersonates somebody, creates political deception or deliberately persuades an audience that something happened when it did not, transparency is reasonable and necessary.
But the more interesting question is: why should transparency operate primarily downward?
Social platforms increasingly identify or request disclosure of certain forms of AI-generated or AI-altered material. There may be legitimate reasons for doing this, but if governments, social-media corporations and commercial organisations believe transparency surrounding artificial intelligence is essential for maintaining public trust, the same principle should apply to them.
If an individual is expected to disclose where AI entered their creative process, then citizens should be entitled to know where AI enters government administration, advertising, recruitment, data analysis, moderation, recommendation systems, surveillance, customer profiling and decisions affecting ordinary people. They should also be entitled to know where it enters the public communication of the very institutions demanding transparency from everybody else.
Australia has already moved toward requiring parts of the Commonwealth public sector to publish information concerning their use and adoption of AI. That principle is important. But if transparency matters, transparency cannot merely travel downward. It must travel upward as well. Otherwise it risks becoming classification: the powerful institution identifies the individual while the individual receives far less information about the technological systems examining, ranking, analysing or influencing them.
WHO GETS TO PUT THE LABEL ON WHOM?
When a powerful platform places an AI designation beside somebody’s work, it may not simply provide neutral technical information. It can influence how audiences emotionally interpret that work. A label can create cultural categories: human, artificial, authentic, questionable, legitimate, suspicious.
But reality is far more complicated. If AI corrects lighting, is the photograph AI-generated? If it removes an unwanted object, is it AI art? If someone takes the original photograph but uses generative technology to extend the background, who created the image? If a musician writes the lyrics, melody and arrangement but uses AI during production, where exactly does authorship cease? If somebody writes every word of an article but uses technology to proofread it, has the machine written the article? If a graphic designer uses automated Photoshop functions, algorithms, templates, filters or generative fill, at what exact point does the human supposedly stop being the creator?
There is no intellectually convincing formula that says: AI WAS INVOLVED, THEREFORE HUMAN CREATIVITY WAS ABSENT.
The more meaningful questions are these: who originated the concept? Who made the important decisions? How substantially did the human direct the process? Was somebody else’s work unlawfully exploited? Was an audience deliberately deceived? Was a real person impersonated? Who accepts responsibility for the finished work? Those are questions about authorship, intention and accountability. Merely identifying the presence of a machine tells us surprisingly little.
BURROUGHS, GIBSON AND THE DISOBEDIENT MACHINE
William S. Burroughs would have recognised something in this argument immediately. Long before generative AI, Burroughs and Brion Gysin were destabilising comfortable assumptions about creativity and authorship through the cut-up technique. Words were physically cut apart. Existing texts were rearranged. Fragments collided. Unexpected meanings emerged from recombination. Selection became part of composition and chance became a creative collaborator.
Burroughs’ experiments with tape recorders pushed this further: record, cut, rearrange, reverse, insert one environment into another, interfere with the transmission and alter the context. He was not using artificial intelligence, but his work forces us to confront an older question: does using a mechanism diminish authorship, or can manipulating the mechanism itself become part of authorship?
That argument existed before AI, before Photoshop and before digital sampling. Every technological generation seems to encounter another moral panic. Photography would destroy painting. Recorded music would destroy live performance. Synthesizers were not real instruments. Sampling was theft. Drum machines were not real drummers. Digital photography was not real photography. Computer-assisted design was not real design. Now AI is supposedly not real creativity.
History rarely leaves these boundaries where their defenders originally placed them.
Then William Gibson walks into the room.
One of the observations most closely associated with Gibson is that “the street finds its own uses for things.” That sentence may be one of the most useful ways to understand generative AI. Technology is developed by corporations, laboratories, governments and institutions. Then ordinary people acquire it, repurpose it and discover uses its creators never anticipated.
A musician becomes their own label. A broadcaster becomes their own international network. A writer becomes their own publisher. A filmmaker carries a production studio in their pocket. A promoter becomes their own advertising department. An independent artist suddenly gains access to visual-production technology that once required considerable financial resources.
The street got the machine.
Perhaps that is precisely what makes this technological moment uncomfortable. The important development is not merely that artificial intelligence exists. It is that ordinary individuals can access it. Technology has escaped the laboratory, advertising agency and multinational corporation and entered ordinary life. That is pure Gibson: not simply machines becoming powerful, but technology escaping its prescribed institutional purpose and being repurposed by the street.
FROM THE PUNK PHOTOCOPIER TO THE AI PROMPT
This is also where the argument becomes punk.
Punk never waited for permission. Make the record. Book the venue. Photocopy the flyer. Staple together the fanzine. Start the label. Learn three chords. Create the clothes. Build the scene. Put on the event. Broadcast the programme. Do it badly if necessary. Learn while doing it. Improve. Do it again.
DO IT YOURSELF.
The punk flyer was not valuable because a multinational advertising company approved its graphic-design standards. Its importance came from immediacy, necessity, communication, culture and individuality. Somebody had something to say and found whatever technology was available to say it.
The photocopier democratised reproduction. Affordable recording equipment democratised music production. Desktop publishing democratised print. Digital cameras democratised photography. The internet democratised distribution. Social media democratised certain forms of promotion. Generative AI may now democratise aspects of creative production that remained comparatively expensive.
That does not mean everything produced with AI is worthwhile. Of course it isn’t. But most things produced without AI are not masterpieces either. Technology does not remove the need for imagination, judgement, taste or cultural knowledge. AI simply changes who has access to particular tools.
DO THEY WANT A CREATOR — OR A CONSUMER?
There is a more uncomfortable question underneath all of this. Modern economies are extremely comfortable with individuals being consumers. Subscribe. Buy. Pay somebody to design. Pay somebody to advertise. Pay somebody to produce. Pay somebody to distribute. Pay somebody to market. Pay another platform to reach the audience you supposedly already have.
The commercial structure works very well when the individual requires intermediaries at almost every stage. But what happens when the individual suddenly needs fewer intermediaries? What happens when the consumer becomes a producer? What happens when one person can write, design, record, edit, publish, promote and distribute? What happens when creative independence becomes technologically achievable for people who previously could not afford it?
It would be too simplistic to claim that every government, business organisation or social-media company consciously wants a passive population that can be easily controlled. There are genuine concerns surrounding fraud, employment, misinformation, copyright, privacy, propaganda and synthetic media.
But the economic question remains legitimate:
WHO LOSES POWER WHEN INDIVIDUALS CAN DO MORE FOR THEMSELVES?
That question has followed technological change for centuries. AI simply makes it impossible to ignore.
HUMAN VERSUS HUMAN
Perhaps the greatest mistake in the artificial-intelligence debate is the way the conflict itself has been framed. We constantly hear HUMAN VERSUS MACHINE.
But the machine does not ridicule somebody for making an AI-assisted flyer. A human does. The machine does not decide one technological process constitutes legitimate creativity while another does not. Humans do. The machine does not create cultural stigma. Humans do. Governments write regulations. Corporations construct platform policies. Industries defend economic structures. Technology companies define categories. Audiences decide what they regard as authentic. Artists judge other artists.
Human beings determine which other human beings are supposedly entitled to particular tools.
Perhaps the conflict was never human versus machine.
Perhaps it remains what it has always been:
HUMAN VERSUS HUMAN
Control versus autonomy. Gatekeeper versus creator. Institution versus individual. Capital versus access. Permission versus DIY. Fear versus possibility.
Somewhere between Burroughs’ scissors, Gibson’s street, the punk photocopier, Photoshop, the synthesiser, the sampler and today’s AI prompt sits the same ancient argument:
WHO GETS TO CREATE?
If the concept began inside my head, if I decided what I wanted to communicate, if I directed the process, rejected what did not represent me, rewrote it, redesigned it, changed it until it communicated what I intended and accepted responsibility for the finished work, then the presence of a machine within that process does not magically erase the human being who initiated it.
Demand transparency where transparency protects people from deception. Absolutely.
But demand it consistently.
Ask the musician. Ask the advertiser. Ask the social-media platform. Ask the multinational corporation. Ask the government department. Ask the technology company. Ask the marketing agency. Ask the algorithm quietly deciding what millions of people see.
Because transparency without equality risks becoming something very different from transparency.
It becomes power deciding who has to explain themselves.
Burroughs cut apart the established language. Punk photocopied its own culture. Gibson understood that technology would inevitably escape into the street.
Now the street has generative artificial intelligence.
The corporations have it. Governments have it. Platforms have it. Advertising agencies have it.
And now the individual has it too.
THE STREET GOT THE MACHINE.
Perhaps that — more than the machine itself — is what changes everything.
REFERENCE AND FURTHER READING
William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin — The Third Mind (Viking Press, 1978). A major reference for cut-up methodology, recombination, collaborative creation and challenges to traditional concepts of authorship.
William S. Burroughs — The Electronic Revolution (1970). Particularly relevant to Burroughs’ thinking on language, recording technology, media and control.
William Gibson — novels, essays and interviews on cyberculture and technological appropriation, including the observation associated with Gibson that “the street finds its own uses for things.”
Australian Government — Digital Transformation Agency. Policy for the Responsible Use of AI in Government and requirements concerning AI accountability and transparency within Commonwealth entities.
National AI Centre — Australia. Guidance on responsible AI, transparency and disclosure.
European Union Artificial Intelligence Act. Transparency provisions concerning certain artificial or manipulated media and AI-generated content.
Meta. Published information concerning AI-generated media labelling, artificial intelligence in recommendations and advertising systems.
Google / YouTube. Published policies covering synthetic-media disclosure, AI-assisted advertising and recommendation technologies.
THE CENTRAL QUESTION
If institutions are entitled to use artificial intelligence to become more powerful, productive and economically efficient, why should the individual be condemned for using the same technological revolution to become more independent?
