AI Rituals: A Performative-Communicative Reconceptualization of Creativity and Meaning-Making in the Age of Generative AI

Abstract

This paper examines how generative artificial intelligence reshapes creativity and meaning-making, proposing a shift from individual authorship toward collective, hybrid, and ritual forms of creation. Drawing on performative, process, communicative, and feminist-posthumanist perspectives, it argues that AI-driven creativity constitutes an “AI ritual”: a socio-technical process and performance where meaning emerges through interaction among humans, algorithms, and data. Rather than viewing creativity as a singular act rooted in human origin or agency, the paper conceptualizes it as a communicative performance involving a range of heterogeneous actors—code, datasets, users, and audiences. Echoing Barthes’ proclamation of the “death of the author,” it proclaims the “death of the creator,” reframing creativity as a dynamic, ritualized, and dialogical-collaborative process. Meaning is understood not predominenatly by its origin but by its circulation and transformation within a communicative collective. After reimagining creativity in the AI age as a shared, posthumanistic, and performative process of co-production, (re-)performance, and co-becoming that is more like love than control, the paper then explores some implications for aesthetics, AI research, and politics of art.