The Expanded Field of AI Production

The expanded field of AI production applies Krauss's 1979 structural method to the categorical crisis AI has produced. The traditional binary organizing creative production—the maker who conceives and executes versus the audience who receives—cannot accommodate work produced through sustained human-AI collaboration. The binary assumes a unified locus of creation; the collaboration distributes creation across human intention, machine generation, and the iterative process connecting them. The expanded field generated from the binaries human-intention/not-human-intention and machine-generation/not-machine-generation reveals at least four distinct positions: (1) human-as-sole-maker (the novelist at her desk, the position the old binary describes); (2) human-as-director (the user who specifies intent and evaluates output, analogous to Sol LeWitt or a film director); (3) human-as-collaborator (the user in iterative conversation with AI, where direction and response co-evolve); (4) AI-as-autonomous-generator (the theoretical limit case current systems approach but do not reach). These positions are not discrete categories but points on a continuum, and most actual AI-assisted practice moves between them. The framework's value is not that it settles