The Soul in the Prompt: AI, Studios, and Authorship as Idea

The Secret Weapon. AI art

Introduction

For centuries, creating a work of art did not always require the artist’s direct intervention. Today, it may not even require a human hand. The figure of the creator as the material executor has historically been more the exception than the rule. From Renaissance workshops to digital installations — and more recently, works generated by artificial intelligence — authorship has proven to be an elusive and deeply cultural notion. What difference is there between a painter giving instructions to an assistant and one composing a prompt for an AI? Where, ultimately, does the artistic act reside?

From Studios to Scripts: A Historical Continuity

In the 16th and 17th centuries, painters began their careers as apprentices in the workshops of established masters. Once they gained recognition, they opened their own studios and hired assistants, who executed most—sometimes all—of the work under their supervision. Today, museums and galleries distinguish between “autograph” works and those attributed to “the workshop of…” Rembrandt, Rubens, and Caravaggio, for instance, delegated large sections—if not entire works—to their students, reserving for themselves the faces, hands, or overall composition.¹

Even in later cases, like that of Henri Matisse, execution was delegated without loss of authorship. During his convalescence, Matisse verbally instructed his assistants on how to arrange the paper cutouts that would become works like The Snail (1953). He did not cut or paste the papers himself: he simply directed. And yet, the work is his—his vision, taste, and aesthetic are present in every decision.²

The analogy with artificial intelligence is clear: the artist no longer needs to execute by hand to be considered the author.

Conceptual Art: The Idea at the Center

The tradition of conceptual art reinforces this dissociation between authorship and execution. For Sol LeWitt, “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”³ His wall drawings were not executed by him, but by teams following precise instructions. The work resided in the idea, not in the hand that traced it.

Damien Hirst, with For the Love of God (2007), commissioned the creation of a human skull covered in platinum and 8,601 diamonds. He didn’t embed a single stone, but no one doubts his authorship. The work arises from an intention, a concept—not technical labor.⁴

Even textual artists like Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner conceived works that could be executed by others or reproduced in different formats without losing their original meaning. Authorship was no longer tied to execution, but to conceptual direction.⁵

What If the Assistant Is a Machine?

Can we extend this logic to artificial intelligence? Functionally speaking, there is no essential difference between a human assistant who follows instructions and an AI that responds to a prompt. Both execute, both can be corrected, both materialize someone else's idea. The difference is ontological and cultural, not operational.

It is often objected that an AI lacks consciousness, intention, or soul. But did Rubens’s assistant have full creative agency? Or Hirst’s goldsmith? What unsettles us is not delegation, but that the delegate is non-human, non-organic.

Here, it’s worth recalling the container metaphor proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980): we conceive the mind and artistic creation as containers of meaning. According to this metaphor, the artist “pours” something from within—soul, inspiration—into the work. But this is itself a cultural construction.⁶ Is there really something “deposited” into the work’s material? Or is the artwork a point of interaction between codes, contexts, and gazes?

Contemporary art seems to have already answered: execution is not the soul of art. Duchamp hinted at this when he signed a urinal: the gesture, the signature, the context are what transform an object into an artwork.

Dalí and the Cynicism of the Signature

Salvador Dalí pushed this logic to a provocative extreme. It is said that he signed blank canvases which were later painted by others, without supervision.⁷ Is this art? Fraud? Or a conceptual performance about the fetishization of the signature?

From a postmodern perspective, Dalí dramatized what the market already knew: what sells is the name, not the brushstroke. If Duchamp could transform a urinal into art through recontextualization, Dalí could transform a blank canvas into an artwork through his signature.

Though such gestures may seem cynical, they call into question—like Warhol or Koons after him—the modern obsession with manual authenticity, shifting the focus to the network of signs that construct a work’s value.

Who Paints When No One Paints?

Seen in this historical light, using AI does not represent a rupture, but a transformed continuity. The artist who issues prompts to an AI is doing nothing fundamentally different from what LeWitt, Matisse, Hirst, or even Dalí did. If authorship is defined by aesthetic intention, editorial curation, and conceptual vision, then using a tool—whether human or not—should not affect the legitimacy of the artistic act.

Authorship, then, does not reside in the gesture, but in the selection and direction. Not in the execution, but in the critical orchestration of media.

As Roland Barthes wrote in The Death of the Author (1967), “the author is born with the text, not before it.”⁸ Perhaps today we might say the artist is born with the way they orchestrate signs, agents, and tools—human or artificial—to produce meaning.

Notes

1. Martin, John Rupert. Baroque. Harper & Row, 1977. See also: Van de Wetering, Ernst. Rembrandt: The Painter at Work. Amsterdam University Press, 1997.
2. Flam, Jack, ed. Matisse on Art. University of California Press, 1995.
3. LeWitt, Sol. “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Artforum, vol. 5, no. 10, 1967, pp. 79–83.
4. Hirst, Damien. On the Way to Work. Faber & Faber, 2001.
5. Godfrey, Tony. Conceptual Art. Phaidon Press, 1998.
6. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980.
7. Dalí, Salvador. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí. William Morrow, 1976. While the anecdote about him signing blank canvases is debated, it has been widely reported by critics like Robert Descharnes and Ian Gibson.
8. Barthes, Roland. “La mort de l’auteur.” Manteia, no. 5, 1967. Reprinted in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath. Hill and Wang, 1977.