Short abstract:

This paper is based on an ethnography of the development and use of a jazz-improvising digital interactive system in an Institute of Technology in the US. It shows that in the course of such development and use, human creative agency and machine creative agency co-constitute in significant ways.

Long abstract:

In different forms of art, a growing number of artists are taking advantage of generative AI technologies to transform their creative practices, delegating different degrees of agentive control and artistic decision-making to those technologies in the hopes of finding inspiration in their output and thereby expanding their own creative horizons. This paper focuses ethnographically on David, a computer scientist who is also a semiprofessional jazz trumpet player, and on his development and use of a jazz-improvising digital interactive system in an Institute of Technology in the US. It explores the programming decisions made by David in his attempt to transform the system’s creative agency in specific ways, and how those decisions resulted in equally consequential transformations in David’s own creative agency as a result of his joint improvisations with this system. In doing so, the paper points to the co-constitution of human creative agency and machine creative agency in the age of generative AI.