Can AI be a subject of creative meaning-making?

Creative generation of meaning in the multiverse of contemporary culture

Abstract

The article examines whether artificial intelligence (AI) can function as a subject of creative meaning-making and argues that the traditional formulation of this problem relies on a mistaken binary opposition («human versus tool» or «biological versus artificial»). The author analyzes phenomenological critiques (J. Searle, H. Dreyfus), the pragmatic concept of the intentional stance (D. Dennett), and posthumanist approaches (R. Braidotti, D. Haraway), revealing the limitations of the classical humanist understanding of agencty. Drawing on Edgar Morin’s complexity thinking and Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, the article shows that creative action in the context of AI is a recursive, dialogical process distributed across human and non-human actants. AI is viewed not as an autonomous author but as an active generative agent that produces «organizing disorder» and recombines the cultural forms encoded within it. Humans, in turn, provide intentionality, contextual framing, evaluative judgment, and ethical responsibility. The article employs the concept of a «hybrid subject» — a human-machine system in which meaning emerges in the interval between human interpretation and machine generation. Particular attention is given to the risks of bias, the «proletarianization» of skills (B. Stiegler), and the loss of craftsmanship in the context of working with opaque «apparatuses» (V. Flusser). The study concludes that the question of AI as a subject of meaning-making is itself incorrect; instead, one must consider a distributed, network-based model of authorship and a new ontology of creativity within a multiversal posthuman culture.