CONCEPT
Conventions of Credit
The shared, unwritten rules that decide whose name goes on the work and whose does not—social arrangements masquerading as facts, now being rewritten for a cooperative network that includes a machine.
Conventions of credit are the rules, in any cooperative creative world, that distribute recognition—who gets paid, who gets named, who gets to decide how the work proceeds, and whose interests are represented when conflicts arise.
Howard Becker studied them because they have consequences, and because they never perfectly match the actual distribution of contributions: contributions are continuous, shading into one another, while credit is discrete—someone's name goes on the cover and someone's does not. The session musician who plays on a hit record and receives no royalties, the ghostwriter who produces a bestseller with no byline, the screenwriter who creates the story and watches the director accept the award—these are not aberrations but structural features of
art worlds whose credit conventions privilege one participant over others. The AI world produces a new and harder version, because the cooperative network now includes a participant—the model—that is not a person. In the cycle that began with
[YOU] on AI, the question of how to