By Sujit Bhar
The art of writing has already been at the receiving end of the current Artificial Intelligence (AI) invasion. Whole AI-written books are preparing to jostle for space on store shelves alongside books written by authors who spent sleepless nights and worrisome days developing new ideas, novel storylines and, ideally, an adherence to societal norms that may have an educational effect long after the author has left.
That labour of love has been thrown on the rocks, dusted and done for, with barely a thought for the creator who made it his or her life’s work and never gave permission for that work to be shared around the world and appropriated by others as they wished.
Now the AI circus is turning its attention to the arts.
The development taking place in Italy’s Carrara marble quarries brings the argument into the physical world. Carrara, synonymous with marble sculpture for centuries, is seeing robotic arms carve complex sculptures from blocks of stone, guided by software that converts digital designs into precise instructions for machines.
The technology is being developed by Italian companies LITIX and ROBOTOR, which argue that it could make marble sculpture more accessible. Their founder and CEO, Giacomo Massari, has put the proposition in remarkably simple terms: “The goal is to be able to create something out of your idea, even if you don’t have the skill to do that.”
That sentence may well become one of the most important statements in the emerging debate about machine-made art.
That is because the question is no longer whether a machine can carve marble. Clearly, it can. The question is whether the person who provides the idea, while a machine performs virtually all the physical work, can legitimately call the resulting object art.
The machine is not the artist—or is it?
Technically, there is nothing particularly revolutionary about robotic arms performing physical work. Manufacturing industries have used robots for decades. Car bodies, engine components and innumerable precision-engineered products are designed digitally and then physically produced by machines.
Nobody seriously asks whether a robot has become an automobile engineer simply because it has manufactured a component.
Art is different.
The traditional sculptor does not merely operate a machine. The physical act of carving is part of the creative process. The artist makes decisions continuously: how deeply to cut, where to remove material, where to leave it, how the stone responds to the chisel, how an imperfection should be incorporated and, perhaps most importantly, when to stop.
A CHANGE IN RELATIONSHIP
The Carrara system changes that relationship.
A digital image can be converted into a three-dimensional file. Software can then generate the toolpaths required by a robot, which performs most of the carving. A skilled human worker can subsequently refine the sculpture.
Massari says robots can perform as much as 99 per cent of the carving, leaving artisans to concentrate on the final details.
That raises a rather uncomfortable question: if the artisan contributes only one per cent of the physical work, what precisely is the contribution that makes the finished object a work of art?
Perhaps the answer is that art was never really about the percentage of physical labour involved. A painter does not create a painting merely because paint passes from a brush to a canvas. A photographer may press a shutter once and yet produce an extraordinary image. A film director does not personally operate every camera, edit every frame or compose every note of music.
Art has always involved tools, assistants and technologies.
The difference with AI-assisted robotic sculpture is one of degree. The machine may cease to be merely a tool and become the principal executor of the physical transformation.
An idea is not necessarily a work of art
THE CORE OF THE PROBLEM
Massari’s argument—that technology allows someone to create something from an idea even without possessing the traditional skill—goes to the heart of the problem.
Suppose a person has a magnificent idea for a marble sculpture, but has never learned to sculpt. He or she produces a digital image, feeds it into the software and instructs a robot to carve the marble. The robot does almost everything.
Is the person an artist?
There are two possible answers.
The first is yes. The artistic act lies in conception. The sculptor conceived the object, determined its appearance and instructed the machine to realise that vision. The robot is simply an extraordinarily sophisticated chisel.
The second answer is more difficult. Perhaps the physical execution is not an incidental part of sculpture, but an essential component of it. If the creator has no knowledge of stone, no understanding of its grain, no experience of carving and no physical involvement in transforming the block, perhaps what exists is a manufactured object based upon an artistic idea rather than a sculpture created by an artist.
That distinction could become crucial.
THE LEGALITY ISSUE
And then comes copyright
The legal problem is even more complicated.
Copyright law generally protects human creative expression, but the precise rules vary between jurisdictions. The central difficulty is obvious: a machine cannot ordinarily become the legal author simply because it created the physical object.
So who owns the copyright in an AI-assisted sculpture?
(a) The person who supplied the idea?
(b) The person who created the digital design?
(c) The software developer?
(d) The operator of the robot?
(e) The human artisan who completed the final one per cent?
(f) Or nobody, if the machine’s contribution is regarded as insufficiently controlled by a human creator?
There is another complication. An idea itself is generally different from the copyrightable expression of that idea. Two sculptors can imagine a woman standing beside a tree; neither automatically owns that concept. Copyright questions arise around the particular creative expression of the idea.
That becomes particularly significant when generative AI is involved.
If the digital model was itself generated from a prompt, rather than painstakingly designed by a human artist, the chain of authorship becomes still more difficult to establish.
Could the robot produce someone else’s sculpture? This is where the possibility of litigation becomes real.
Imagine that a traditional sculptor has spent two years developing a distinctive sculpture. A photograph or digital representation of that sculpture finds its way into an AI system. Someone then produces a three-dimensional digital model based on it and instructs a robotic carving system to reproduce it in marble.
The finished sculpture might be physically different from the original.
But could the original artist argue that the protected expression of his or her work has been reproduced?
Potentially, yes—depending on the jurisdiction, the precise facts, the degree of similarity and the applicable copyright and other intellectual-property laws.
The important point is that changing the medium does not necessarily eliminate an intellectual-property issue. A work copied from canvas onto a computer, or transformed into another physical form, does not automatically become free of the original creator’s rights.
The coming disputes may, therefore, not be about whether a robot can carve marble. They may be about who supplied the creative expression that the robot was instructed to reproduce.
A sculptor could conceivably claim that an AI-generated or robot-carved object infringes his or her copyright or other rights if the underlying creative work was appropriated without permission.
But what about the sculptor’s skill?
A TRICKIER ISSUE
There is another issue that copyright law alone cannot answer.
For centuries, sculptors have acquired their craft through apprenticeship, experimentation, failure and physical labour. Carrara’s traditional sculptors have knowledge that cannot simply be downloaded into software.
The arrival of robots has consequently produced mixed reactions. Some traditional sculptors are uneasy about machines taking over work that traditionally required years of training.
Massari’s response is that “you’re not killing a job, you’re just evolving that job.”
There is truth in that argument. Technology has repeatedly transformed artistic professions. Photography did not eliminate painting. Digital editing did not eliminate filmmaking. Computer-aided design did not eliminate architects.
Robotic carving may similarly change the sculptor’s role rather than destroy it.
There are also practical advantages. If machines can undertake the dangerous, exhausting and physically demanding bulk of marble carving, human artisans could devote themselves to refinement and creative decisions. The technology’s proponents argue that it could make working with marble safer and less physically demanding.
But that does not settle the artistic question. Is the finished object actually art?
Ultimately, the most difficult question may have nothing to do with copyright.
It may be philosophical.
If a human conceives a sculpture, software translates the idea into instructions and a robot removes 99 per cent of the marble, there is undeniably a physical object at the end. It may be beautiful. It may be technically extraordinary. It may provoke emotion.
But does beauty automatically make something art?
Perhaps not.
Art has historically contained an element of human intention. A machine can execute instructions with astonishing precision, but it does not experience the marble, understand mortality, remember childhood, suffer loss or contemplate beauty.
On the other hand, perhaps those experiences need only belong to the human who conceived the work. The machine does not have to feel for the resulting work to communicate what the human intended.
That is the uncomfortable frontier.
The robot may never become the artist. But it could become the artist’s hands.
And if the machine becomes sufficiently capable of replacing those hands, society will eventually have to decide whether the human contribution lies in thinking, making, or some combination of both.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF IT
The Carrara experiment, therefore, represents something larger than another technological advancement. It asks whether art is the idea, the craft, the execution, the struggle—or the final object itself.
If the answer is simply the final object, then the robot has already entered the world of art.
If art requires the human hand and the human journey behind it, the marble sculpture produced by artificial intelligence and robotics may remain something else: an extraordinarily sophisticated manufactured object inspired by art.
And perhaps that distinction will matter more than ever when the first robot-carved masterpiece is sold not merely as a piece of marble, but as a work carrying the name, reputation and intellectual property of a human artist.
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