Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt's conceptual practice, beginning in the mid-1960s, established the separation of idea from execution that AI-assisted production has now generalized across every domain of making. LeWitt's wall drawings were specified in natural-language instructions—"lines, not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors"—that anyone could execute. The specification was the work; the execution was delegated to assistants, museum staff, or whoever was installing the piece. No two installations were identical because the instructions permitted variation, yet every installation was recognizably a LeWitt because the conceptual structure was consistent. This practice anticipated the structural condition of AI collaboration: a human conceives and specifies, a non-human agent executes according to the specification, and the output is shaped by both the conception and the execution while being reducible to neither. LeWitt never touched the walls of most of his drawings, yet they are "his" in every meaningful sense—they bear the mark of his intention, his aesthetic judgment, his systematic exploration of combinatorial possibilities within self-imposed constraints. The authorship resides in the