Credit Conventions in AI

Every art world has credit conventions, and none of them perfectly match the actual distribution of contributions. They cannot, because contributions are continuous — each participant contributes something, shading into others without clean boundaries — while credit is discrete: someone's name goes on the cover, and someone's does not. The discretization necessarily produces distortion. The question Becker asked was not whether art worlds are fair but whether the credit conventions accurately represent the actual distribution of contributions, and what happens when they do not. The AI world has produced a new version of the credit problem, complicated because the cooperative network includes a participant that is not a person: the model itself. When Segal writes that 'neither of us owns that insight' — referring to a connection that emerged from collaboration with Claude — he is describing a situation for which existing conventions of authorship have no adequate response.