What Art Is Now

What Art is Now: Creativity in the Age of AI explores one of the most urgent questions of our time: What happens to human creativity when machines can generate music, paintings, poetry, and design? This thought-provoking book examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we define, create, and experience art. Blending philosophy, law, neuroscience, and cultural history, the authors investigate how AI challenges traditional notions of authorship, originality, and artistic value.
Written for a broad audience-from artists and educators to tech developers and curious thinkers-What Art is Now invites readers into a conversation that spans centuries of creative thought and confronts the promises and perils of machine-made imagination. Can AI be truly creative, or is it only mimicking the human mind? Will artists be replaced, or will they find new ways to collaborate with algorithms? And what rights do humans have over works produced in partnership with machines?
Timely, accessible, and deeply interdisciplinary, this book offers a roadmap for understanding the rapidly shifting terrain of art and technology. At stake is more than just the future of the arts-it's how we understand ourselves as creative beings in a world where intelligence is no longer uniquely human.

Michael E. Jones, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, has spent decades at the intersection of ethics, technology, law and the humanities, helping students and professionals alike explore a world increasingly shaped by rapid digital transformation. For more than forty years, he has taught university courses that probe the ethical boundaries of emerging technologies, governance rules, and intellectual property and how these forces are reshaping our understanding of creativity, law, sports, and the arts.
He has authored nine foundational books about sports law, entertainment law, and art law and has advised Olympic athletes, museums, and creative professionals at every level from PBS TV stars to street artists. But just as critically, he has pushed audiences to ask hard questions about fairness, authorship, and the human consequences of technological progress.
His latest book, soon to be published by Bloomsbury later this year, What Art Is Now: Creativity in the Age of AI, tackles one of the most urgent: What happens to human creativity when machines can mimic or even replace it?
Michael earned his undergraduate degree in Economics from Denison University, followed by an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to receive his law degree from the University of Miami and pursued further graduate degree studies in law and art at Harvard University. He studied fine art at the Art Students League and the New Hampshire Institute of Art, co-edited with his wife, Christine, a book on legendary photo-journalist Rowland Scherman, co-produced with Christine a film documentary on esteemed painter Nancy Ellen Craig, and has served on boards from Provincetown to academia to the Olympics.

Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
One | What Art Was
Two | Redefining Art in the Digital Age
Three | Creative Divide: Human vs. Machine
Four | Beyond the Algorithm: The Essence of AI
Five | Borrowed Brushes: AI Training, Infringement and Fair Use
Six | Cultural (Mis)appropriation in the Age of AI
Seven | Faces in the Machine: Artistic Innovation or Invasion
Eight | What Art is Now: Creativity in the Age of AI
Index
About the Authors