Collective Agency in Art-making: Towards Community-centric Design of Text-to-Image (T2I) AI Tools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Text-to-image (T2I) AI tools are trained on vast datasets of existing images and artworks. We identify that existing ethical standards and regulatory safeguards for these tools largely lie within the Western neoliberal realm. They assume that artistic creativity originates from individuals rather than in collectives or social environments, ownership is an individual concern rather than shaped by communities and shared cultural traditions, and compensation should be based on individual claims rather than acknowledging collective contributions to artistic knowledge. In this paper, we counter these assumptions by theorizing ‘collective agency’ as a critical conceptual lens to rethink artists’ community-centric roles in relation to these tools. Drawing from our nine-month-long qualitative interventions with diverse Bangladeshi artist groups, we find that these artists manifest cultural resonance, co-creation, and sense of recognition through their art-making practices which fosters collective agency among them. This empirically grounded account of collective agency in our study posits practical design and policy implications, such as incorporating artists’ solidarity, community-centric data stewardship, and collective bargaining mechanisms in ethical development of T2I AI tools to reclaim artists' control over their creative practices in the AI age.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".