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AI generated image Introduction When Walter Benjamin published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935/36), he captured a decisive threshold in the history of culture: the moment when the artwork ceased to exist solely as a unique, auratic object and entered the domain of reproducibility. Photography and film did not merely multiply artworks; they transformed the very conditions of art, undermining the singularity of the original. Benjamin’s account has since become canonical, a touchstone for thinking about technology, aesthetics, and politics. Yet the story did not end where Benjamin left it. In our own time, the rise of intelligent software and generative AI suggests a new epochal shift—one in which reproduction mutates into generativity: a production of “copies without originals.” The Genealogy of Reproduction For the Greeks, reproducibility was constrained: casting in bronze or terra cotta, stamping coins. Most artworks—paintings, sculptures—remained irr...