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1 Introduction

Technological revolutions drive the evolution of artistic production. Historically, the material means and expressive forms of art have evolved in tandem with technological progress; each breakthrough has expanded the possibilities and practical boundaries of creative practice. As a cornerstone of the post-Third Industrial Revolution era, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is empowering human spiritual production with unprecedented depth and breadth, emerging as a transformative force that reshapes the entire artistic process. As Marx pointed out in The Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858, the machine system “is produced not only in the form of knowledge but also as a direct organ of social practice”(Marx, & Engels, 2009c: 198). Artificial intelligence is a vivid contemporary embodiment of this assertion: it is both an organ for the externalization of human cognitive functions and a product of the material extension of mental labor. Its essence is an advanced form of the objectification of human knowledge and power, confirming the dialectical process through which humans externalize their essential powers via technological means and apply them to the practice of art production. Therefore, artificial intelligence does not transcend the theoretical category of the Marxist means of labor. Instead, as an advanced form of materialized labor, it constitutes a concrete development and practical extension of Marxist labor theory in the field of art production in the AI era.

When symbolic forms such as texts, images, audios, and videos generated by artificial intelligence are widely integrated into art production practices, including painting, music, literature, film and television, “AI Art” emerges as the times require, whose core feature is the reconstruction of the traditional process and subjective relationship of art production through technological empowerment. The in-depth intervention of artificial intelligence poses a profound challenge to the traditional concepts, modes of art production based on human labor and their Marxist philosophical foundations. Hegel (1979) once foresaw that artistic reception would shift from “reverence and worship” to “careful reflection” and called for art to accept “higher criteria of judgment”. The emergence of AI art undoubtedly confirms and amplifies this shift. When technological empowerment penetrates into the field of art production, which is highly characterized by human subjectivity, the philosophical reflections and ethical concerns it triggers regarding the essence of labor, subject attribution, and value judgment are particularly prominent. This requires us to re-examine the essence, value and development direction of art production with a more prudent and rational attitude based on the Marxist view of labor. Therefore, constructing value judgment criteria for art production adapted to the AI era should not only focus on innovations in form and technique, but also base on the dialectical relationship between living labor and materialized labor, and deeply explore the human spiritual value, emotional depth and cultural implication carried by the works, which is precisely the concrete embodiment of the Marxist view of labor endowing art production with internal depth and contemporary breadth.

2 Subjectivity Analysis of AI-Empowered Art Production from the Perspective of Marxist Labor Theory

At present, driven by artificial intelligence, art production is undergoing a digital transformation. In essence, art production is a practical process in which humans create value in spiritual production through living labor. Through this active process, artists objectify their inner emotions and thoughts, which not only meet the needs of individual expression but also respond to the spiritual needs of society. The intervention of artificial intelligence complicates the dialectical relationship between living labor and the materialized labor embodied in the means of production, becoming a variable that reshapes the subjective relationship of art production.

Scholar Li Tiancheng (2024) summarized the AI art creation process in terms of four core links: “the artist writes or selects existing AI tools independently; the artist issues instructions to the AI; the AI retrieves and processes database information and generates content according to the instructions”. Based on the interaction mode and distribution of rights and responsibilities between humans and AI in creation, its forms can be divided into three categories: first, tool-assisted type, in which the artist is completely dominant and AI only acts as a technical tool to perform tasks such as data processing or formal simulation; second, human-machine collaborative type, in which the artist and AI form a cooperative relationship, the artist controls the creative intention, aesthetic judgment and final decision, and AI participates in partial generation and feedback; third, algorithmic autonomous generation type, in which AI, as the subject of formal generation, independently completes the whole process from symbol production to work presentation, with minimal human intervention. Within the framework of Marxist labor theory, according to the presence of living labor in the process and its dominance over materialized labor, the above types can be further summarized into two dominant modes of empowering art production.

2.1 The Mode of AI Art Production Dominated by Living Labor

In Capital, Marx observed: “When the means of labor assume the material form of machinery, they require the substitution of natural forces for human labor power, and the conscious application of natural science for routine rules derived from experience.”(Marx, & Engels, 2009b: 443) As an aggregate of human knowledge and intelligence, AI is a contemporary embodiment of this conscious application of science—a concrete form of the objectification and materialization of human intellect. Moreover, it serves as a means of labor that empowers and enhances the efficiency of artistic production. In the mode dominated by living labor, the artist retains a dominant role in creation, and the realization of AI’s artistic functions still serves the artist’s subjective intention, relying on the soul and direction endowed by the artist’s living labor. At present, this mode manifests in two primary forms:

In its primary form, artificial intelligence acts as an advanced production tool whose intelligent attributes are entirely directed toward enhancing efficiency, simplifying repetitive labor in art production through technological empowerment. For example, the 2016 AI artwork The Next Rembrandt reflects this: the creation team dominated the whole process, including style deconstruction, big data analysis, 3D scanning and machine learning feature extraction, as well as data input, AI training and final 3D printing presentation. In such practices, AI is confined to repetitive tasks such as data processing and pattern simulation, aimed at improving efficiency and expanding the boundaries of human information processing, without intervening in creative generation. The artist always controls the creative direction, intention setting and final endowment of aesthetic value. As a product of materialized labor, the instrumental value of AI ultimately serves the decision-making power of human labor.

From the perspective of the labor process, the creator’s living labor is reflected not only in intention setting and value assignment, but also in the operation, monitoring, and calibration of this advanced tool—artificial intelligence—to ensure that the output meets the preset goals. This active control over the means of labor highlights the core position of human labor in art production. At this time, artificial intelligence is essentially a highly intelligent “brush” or “chisel”, an advanced means for living labor to extend essential powers and empower art production with quality and efficiency improvement.

With breakthroughs in technologies such as machine learning, AI’s capabilities in data processing and generative performance have been enhanced, enabling living labor to extend to the field of art creation at a deeper level. Thus, the human-machine collaborative art production mode has developed, forming a collaborative closed loop of “human creativity + technological empowerment”. A case in point is Microsoft’s “Bing Video Creator”. Leveraging OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora, this tool enables creators to iteratively adjust image parameters to refine video generation outcomes. In this mode, the distribution of creative agency shows a certain degree of decentralization, the absolute dominance of the artist is weakened, and AI may provide formal suggestions beyond the preset. However, these suggestions essentially stem from the massive datasets learned by AI, which are constituted by human historical practice.

As Marx stated in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: “From the theoretical sphere, plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., on the one hand as objects of natural science and on the other as objects of art, are part of human consciousness, the inorganic body of the human spirit, and spiritual food that humans must process in advance to enjoy and digest.”(Marx, & Engels, 2009a: 161) In fact, the materials for AI art creation also come from nature and human society. As the “inorganic spiritual nature” of the digital age, its training data and algorithm logic are processed spiritual materials carrying specific historical contexts and the crystallization of past human materialized labor.

Therefore, artificial intelligence itself lacks emotional drive, independent aesthetic consciousness, and genuine creative intention, and its participation in art further confirms the fundamental dependence of art production on human subjects. In such creations, the artist still occupies a dominant position, undertaking the responsibilities of setting core intentions, exercising aesthetic judgment, and determining the outcomes. The degree of AI participation has deepened, but it has not changed its essence as an intelligent tool or cooperative partner serving human creative goals. From the perspective of Marxist labor theory, human-machine collaborative creation does not change the labor essence of art production. On the one hand, the artist’s living labor still dominates the whole process of value creation and objectifies the unique spiritual world into the work. On the other hand, as an extension of materialized labor, the technological evolution of AI not only does not subvert its fundamental attribute as a means of labor, but also confirms at a deeper level the possibility for humans to expand the boundaries of art production with the help of advanced tools.

2.2 The Formal Autonomy of Materialized Labor

The formal autonomy of materialized labor specifically refers to algorithmic autonomous creation, which is an extreme form of AI-empowered art production. In this form, human labor retreats significantly and recedes into the background at the immediate stage of work generation. In contrast, the pre-existing living labor presents a formal and simulated autonomous operation state in the form of materialized labor through the AI system. Human intervention is minimized. At present, most such systems belong to “Weak AI” or “Narrow AI”, whose behavioral logic is strictly confined to preset programs and instructions, lacking the ability to initiate creation independently. “Fundamentally speaking, its products of labor should serve the overall development requirements of human beings.”(Hu, & He, 2019) In this scenario, the human role is often reduced to that of a system monitor and exception handler, which is significantly different from traditional tools. As an extension of human organs, the function realization of traditional tools completely depends on the skills of users and the meaning endowed by initiative, and the ability to control tools directly depends on the operator’s practical skills.

Compared with “Weak AI” dominated by living labor, “Strong AI” or “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI) is theoretically conceived as a form beyond special instrumentality, with the potential of human-like general consciousness, which can initiate universal and formally creative generation behaviors based on its own cognitive framework, and its activities are not limited to a single field or immediate instructions (Goertzel, 2014). Current technological development has shown a trend of evolving towards AGI systems. For example, RoboBrain2.0 of the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, relying on multi-machine collaborative planning and spatial reasoning capabilities, combined with robot hardware and large models, supports the completion of complex tasks and promotes the extension of artificial intelligence to the fields of physical world perception, reasoning and interaction (Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, 2025). This provides a theoretical basis for AI to independently conduct art creation, and some viewpoints hold that AGI, as an integrated intelligent agent, can independently engage in art creation.

However, AGI is essentially still a highly complex materialized form of human living labor, relying on algorithmic simulation of the laws of human intelligence; its “creative” behavior is actually an advanced form of probabilistic recombination of knowledge. The electric power, computing power, and data resources it consumes indicate that its creative behavior is a material consumptive process rather than a genuinely creative spiritual activity. Human activities seem to be highly abstracted away here, with individual behaviors seemingly regulated by AI output logic. However, its underlying logic is still dominated by the rules and goals built into the system and set by past human labor. Therefore, the conscious subjectivity, purposefulness and creativity simulated by AGI in form are fundamentally the “formal autonomy” presented by human pre-existing and collective living labor through highly complex materialized labor. It is not living labor with genuine internal purpose and free will, but an advanced, arguably ultimate, form of the development of materialized labor.

In sharp contrast to the mode dominated by living labor, AGI does not become a new creative subject; rather, it obscures the source of human living labor condensed within it in an unprecedented way, creating the subjective illusion that “the means of labor are laboring themselves”. Therefore, it should be accurately understood as the illusory formal autonomy of materialized labor, whose essence is still a manifestation of human realization of art production automation through technological empowerment.

As mentioned above, the concept of the formal autonomy of materialized labor aims to reveal the potential and the philosophical dilemmas presented by artificial intelligence technology in simulating human creation. Its key feature is that the highly complex materialized labor system shows formal autonomous operation ability at the operational level, that is, within the preset algorithm and data boundaries, it can complete the complex symbol generation process without continuous and immediate human intervention. This automation efficiency makes its output highly similar in appearance to stylized human products. However, even in the most cutting-edge AI conceptions, strong AI still lacks genuine intentionality and value consciousness originating from self-awareness, and its philosophical foundation is deeply rooted in the human-preset technical framework and objective function.

From the perspective of the essence of labor, it is this high formal approximation that compels us to re-examine the boundaries of the concept of labor in the AI era at the theoretical level: when materialized labor is complex enough to highly simulate the external manifestations of living labor, how should we examine the subjectivity of creation and the essence of labor? Marx pointed out: “The result obtained at the end of the labor process already existed in the worker’s imagination at the beginning of the process, that is, it already existed ideally.”(Marx, & Engels, 2009a: 208) This means that no matter how amazing the works generated by artificial intelligence are, the most original starting point of the whole process—purpose, intention and values—is still deeply rooted in and derived from human labor. “In fact, even if artificial intelligence becomes more intelligent, it is itself a product of human labor, and ultimately cannot be separated from human labor.”(Yu, 2025) Therefore, artificial intelligence is by no means a creative subject that transcends human labor in essence. Rather, it is an automated extension and formal expression of human pre-existing living labor, realized through a highly complex materialized labor system, which is fundamentally a special form of technologically empowered art production.

3 Contemporary Characteristics and Value Transformation of Art Production Empowered by Artificial Intelligence

First of all, the highly developed materialized labor in the AI system has become a prerequisite for art production. In contrast, the relative value of individual artists’ living labor based on physical skills in the creative process has decreased, and the efficiency of art production increasingly depends on the ability to control the AI system as a product of materialized labor. The core value of traditional art is centered on the individuality of the creative subject, in which originality is regarded as the basic criterion of artistic value, requiring creators to achieve breakthrough expression in the whole process from conception to presentation, rooted in individual, independent thinking and manual practice. However, in actual creation intervened by artificial intelligence, AI—“insofar as it is not the human body itself, constitutes an important part of the human ‘inorganic body’”(Marx, & Engels, 2009c: 185)—becomes the material support for empowering art production.

The dominance of objectified labor has significantly reduced the emphasis on individual physical skills; artistic production capacity has shifted from manual craftsmanship to the oversight of AI systems. As Marx observed: “The worker regards the tool as an organ and endows it with a soul through his own skills and activities; therefore, the ability to master the tool depends on the worker’s digital craftsmanship.”(Marx, & Engels, 2009c: 187) In AI-driven art, this craftsmanship is redefined as the ability to adjust algorithmic parameters, curate data samples, and steer model generation. This transformation has blurred the boundary of originality: works generated by AI are based on the learning and recombination of massive data, and their innovation relies more on breakthroughs in data correlation methods in human-machine collaboration rather than traditional creation from scratch. If individual independent originality is still used as the evaluation criterion, it will be difficult to accurately measure the actual creative nature of AI art.

At the same time, the attribute of AI artworks as bearers of value has become increasingly prominent, shifting the evaluation criteria of art production from prioritizing aesthetic experience toward a more inclusive integration of multiple values, which is an inevitable result of AI-empowered art production. In traditional art evaluation, aesthetic pleasure, emotional resonance and ideological enlightenment are often regarded as core criteria. Jameson (2013) pointed out: “In the production relations of the whole society, the production of beauty is increasingly regulated by various economic formations and must change its basic social and cultural roles and functions.” In AI art practice, influenced by economic structures, the market value, data value, and technical symbolic value of works often become the priority considerations. At the same time, aesthetic experience has shifted from its originally exclusive central position to a co-existing element within a multi-value network. This transformation is not the disappearance of aesthetic value, but a structural reorganization of the value evaluation system, which is essentially the expansion of the value dimension of art production under technological empowerment. Therefore, even if the visual presentation of an AI work does not necessarily meet traditional aesthetic standards, it may still gain value recognition and legitimate status in the contemporary art context if it achieves breakthroughs in dimensions such as conceptual innovation, interactive construction, or engagement with social issues. This change not only reflects the structural evolution of the art production evaluation system but also reveals the value-oriented transformation brought about by the deep intervention of technology in art.

Finally, the materialized labor embodied in the AI system is not only reflected in art products and tools, but also directly constitutes art productivity itself, becoming a carrier empowering the innovation of the whole process of art production. Artificial intelligence has reconstructed the whole process from creative conception to communication and feedback, becoming an indispensable vehicle of art productivity, promoting the transformation of art production mode from individual manual labor to human-machine collaborative collective production, which aligns with the characteristic of the machine system emerging as productivity in its own right. It is particularly noteworthy that when the AI system assumes the role of a carrier of art productivity, the corresponding art production standards should also adapt to this process transformation. Traditional art evaluation mostly focuses on the result itself, judging the merits of the creative process based on the final presentation, and the attention to the process is usually limited to the individual skills and habits of the artist. In AI art creation, the whole process reflects multi-stage collaboration between humans and technology: from the living labor invested by the artist in the creative conception stage, to the specific output of AI as materialized labor, to the in-depth interaction between the two through parameter adjustment and algorithm iteration, and finally to the revision of the creative direction based on public feedback. Each stage presents the mutual influence and dynamic balance between living labor and materialized labor.

As Marx pointed out, the “objective reality” generated by industrial history is “the book of human essential powers”(Marx, & Engels, 2009a: 162). The emergence of AI art creation not only expands human essential powers but also shapes a new way for humans to affirm themselves in the objective world through technical media. In essence, it forms a realistic generation mechanism for new dimensions of human essential powers. Therefore, when constructing evaluation criteria for AI art, it is necessary to incorporate process evaluation, focusing on factors such as system stability, the effectiveness of human-machine collaboration, and the rationality of data use, so as to form a more comprehensive aesthetic evaluation framework adapted to the realities of technology and provide theoretical support for the standardized development of AI-empowered art production.

4 Construction of Value Judgment Criteria for AI-Empowered Art Production

Artificial intelligence technology intervenes in the art field in the form of a tool. While expanding the boundaries of artistic expression, it also disrupts the art production evaluation system and shakes its value foundation. It is urgent to construct value judgment criteria suited to the era of technological empowerment based on the Marxist view of labor. In this regard, scholar Wang Qingyi (2024) pointed out: “AI art may never be completely disconnected from human beings, because it ultimately belongs to humans—specifically, the reasons are: first, humans created the original algorithm architecture; second, the creation of AI art is based on the database of past human art; third, the confirmation of AI art also lies in the selection and judgment of the human art world.” This assertion shows that the re-evaluation of AI art should not be limited to superficial discussions of technical aesthetics, but should return to the grand vision of Marxist labor theory, focusing on the injection of human free nature and subjective spirit in art creation, as well as the unity of aesthetic laws and historical dimensions, so as to establish evaluation basis adapted to the era of human-machine collaboration.

4.1 Free Activity: The Value Orientation of AI-Empowered Art Production

In addressing the subordinate relationship between the machine system and living labor, Marx asserted: “In the machine system, knowledge appears to the worker as something external and alien, and living labor is subordinate to objectified labor that acts independently. As long as the needs of capital do not require the worker’s activity, the worker becomes redundant.”(Marx, & Engels, 2009c: 34) This means that if the artist’s knowledge and style are externalized into alienated algorithms and data—leading living labor to be subordinate to highly intelligent objectified labor—and if the artist completely obeys the logic of platform algorithms, becoming a technical appendage in pursuit of traffic, then artistic creation will lose its free nature and degenerate into alienated labor dominated by technology and capital. Therefore, evaluating AI art must introduce a critical perspective, insist on the primacy of living labor over technology, and focus on examining whether the work truly reflects the artist’s dominance as the production subject, and whether technological empowerment in the creative process serves the free development of human beings.

On this basis, the construction of evaluation criteria should follow another principle of Marx: “How the object becomes his object depends on the nature of the object and the nature of the essential power corresponding to it.”(Marx, & Engels, 2009a: 193) This means that we must adhere to the basic position of art as “the objectification of human essential powers”. The value of AI art does not depend on the complexity of the algorithm, but on whether it can become a new organ for representing, affirming, and enriching human spiritual life under the guidance of human intentionality. This criterion ensures that AI empowerment does not degenerate into a tool of alienated labor, but enables it to transcend pure formal innovation and become a carrier for expanding the freedom of artistic expression, highlighting the purpose of “human liberation” in Marxist labor theory.

4.2 Subjective Injection of Internal Standards: The Humanistic Foundation of AI-Empowered Art Production

The foundation of aesthetic value judgment lies in human aesthetic perception. Marx discussed the issue of “internal standards” in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and pointed out that humans “know how to produce according to any kind of standard, and know how to apply the inherent standard to objects everywhere”(Marx, & Engels, 2009a: 191). The inherent standard here is the unique internal standard of human beings, which encapsulates emotions, will, aesthetic ideals, and value judgments, and is a concentrated embodiment of subjectivity. The reason why artistic creation can become an activity confirming the human species essence is precisely that the creator objectifies this internal standard into the work through living labor.

As a complex form of materialized labor, artificial intelligence does not have the ability to generate its own internal standards. Its operating mechanism is essentially the technical execution and materialized extension of human internal standards, and its fundamental role in empowering art production is to carry forward these human internal standards. Thus, the value of AI art does not stem from the so-called autonomy of the algorithm, but depends on the depth and way in which human labor injects internal standards into the entire creative process. Specifically: at the initial stage of creation, the training data relied on by AI is actually the materialized accumulation of internal standards in the history of human art, and the algorithm logic is also based on the formalized coding of beauty by humans; in the creative process, the artist’s adjustment of model parameters, refining the creative direction and screening of output results are essentially embedding their own internal standards into the technical program through living labor; in terms of the essence of the work, the reason why the content generated by AI can be included in the category of art is not because it has genuine subjective creativity, but because it ultimately carries and reproduces human internal standards. Once separated from the dominance of living labor, the output of AI only appears as a mechanical combination of data and algorithms. It cannot achieve the genuine “objectification of human essential powers”.

Therefore, when evaluating AI art, it is necessary to focus on examining whether the work is a stylistic imitation driven by mechanical instructions, or a creative transformation of emotions and thoughts triggered by the in-depth interaction between living labor and materialized labor, and whether it truly and profoundly reflects human internal standards. Genuine artistic value creation stems from the artist’s profound and innovative transformation of their unique life experience and aesthetic concepts through technical media. Without the creative subjective injection brought by living labor, the output of AI will eventually appear as a mere technical display, rather than the genuine objectification of human essential powers. This means that the value of AI empowerment lies in extending human aesthetic standards through technology, rather than replacing human subjective creation, which constitutes the humanistic baseline of AI-empowered art production.

4.3 “The Unity of Aesthetics and History”: The Value Criterion of AI-Empowered Art Production

Engels put forward the critical criterion of “the unity of the aesthetic and the historical” in German Socialism in Verse and Prose, advocating that art evaluation should take into account both aesthetic formal laws and specific historical contexts, examining both the aesthetic value of the work and its social significance and historical inevitability(Marx, & Engels, 2009d: 177). At present, when artificial intelligence reshapes the mode of art production, this criterion not only remains effective but also acquires renewed explanatory power in the contemporary context where materialized labor is dominant, multiple values coexist, and production modes are systematic, becoming an important theoretical basis for constructing the value criterion of AI-empowered art production.

From the perspective of the “aesthetic” criterion, AI art shifts traditional aesthetic evaluation from a focus on individual skills toward a comprehensive investigation of aesthetic expression under human-machine collaboration. The “aesthetic” criterion proposed by Engels is rooted in the overall grasp of human artistic activities by Marxist aesthetics. In this theoretical context, Marx’s assertion that “humans also construct according to the laws of beauty” provides a profound philosophical foundation for the “aesthetic” criterion, and the two resonate with each other theoretically. The so-called “laws of beauty” are not abstract formal laws, but the unity between human internal standards and the external standards of objects. In AI art, technical standards can be regarded as external standards, while human aesthetic ideals represent internal standards. Its aesthetic value is reflected in whether the two achieve organic unity, which is the dialectical balance between technological empowerment and aesthetic experience.

As for the “historical” criterion, the value evaluation of AI art needs to be based on the profound changes in the relationship between living labor and materialized labor in the course of technological civilization. When artistic creation shifts from relying on individualized and physical skills to a new production mode characterized by human-machine collaboration and highly dependent on the materialized labor system, whether the work can reflect and consciously reflect upon this new type of production relations has become an important dimension for judging its historical value. This is precisely the response and development of Engels’ view that “art reflects production relations” in the AI era.

To sum up, in the context of AI empowerment, the “aesthetic” criterion pertains to the aesthetic expression of human-machine collaboration. In contrast, the “historical” criterion addresses how technology innovates and reflects upon artistic production relations. Through the dialectical unity of aesthetic and historical dimensions, we can reaffirm the subjective status of living labor in the era of AI art. This is not only the contemporary continuation of Engels’ literary and artistic criticism thought, but also the inevitable requirement for the art production evaluation system to adapt to the changes of the times. The construction of the future art production evaluation system will inevitably be a dynamic process of continuous adjustment in the practice of human-machine collaboration. Its ultimate purpose is not to resist technological progress, but to guide technological development to maintain ethical consciousness and promote art’s return to the essential dimension of humanism. This aims to construct a Marxist art production evaluation system rooted in traditional aesthetic spirit and capable of effectively responding to the reality of technological civilization, thereby providing theoretical guidelines for the high-quality development of AI-empowered art production.

5 Conclusion

The philosophical speculation and ethical tension triggered in the process of AI-empowered art production are essentially the dual reconstruction of and challenge posed by the technological revolution to human existence and labor forms. Marxism holds that art is “the objectification of human essential powers”, and this fundamental attribute will not change with the evolution of technological forms. Artistic value does not depend on the advanced degree of technological empowerment, but on its ability to construct a spiritual world and endow meaning—that is, to present humanity’s unique thinking about life, existence, and labor value through a symbolic system.

From an ontological perspective, AI art creation cannot replace human artists. Still, its technical characteristics do exert a subversive impact on those production modes that mainly rely on repetitive skills. Such production modes lack the profound life experience and creative thinking injected by living labor, remaining at the level of mechanical reproduction of skills and batch generation of symbols, and are thus unable to carry the spiritual connotation that art should have. In contrast, the distinctive qualities of human artists lie in their unique perception of life experience, profound insight into social reality, and creative transformation of cultural context. This spiritual labor, originating from human subjectivity, determines that they are always the dominant force in artistic creation.

To sum up, AI empowerment has brought unprecedented development possibilities to art production. In the technological context where algorithmic logic increasingly penetrates all fields of society, artificial intelligence should become a tool to extend human creative ability and expand the boundaries of art production, rather than an external force that dissolves human subjectivity and is alienated to dominate art production. The evaluation system based on Marxist labor theory will promote artificial intelligence technology to truly serve the humanistic essence of art and the high-quality advancement of art production, and realize the unity of technological empowerment, labor liberation, and spiritual value.

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