Authorship Signalling in Human-AI Co-Creation: Attribution Infrastructures, Identity Claims, and Value Allocation in Cultural and Creative Work

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping cultural and creative work by unsettling the assumed link between creative labour, human agency, and entitlement to authorship. Existing scholarship documents audience scepticism towards machine creativity and broader tensions around originality, yet it underspecifies how creators make authorship credible when production is hybrid and contested. This conceptual paper develops a multilevel process theory of authorship signalling, defined as situated practices through which creators render human contributions intelligible and defensible to audiences and clients when AI is implicated in production. The theory distinguishes authorship signalling from transparency, provenance tooling, and general impression management by foregrounding the object of accountability: attribution of creative agency and credit. This paper proposes a four-stage process in which creators craft contribution claims; platforms and organisational clients standardise proofs of contribution through governance cues; and audiences infer authenticity under evaluative biases. In this paper, allocation outcomes are defined narrowly as market-exchange consequences that are directly influenced by attribution cues, particularly through differential visibility, ranking, and contracting terms that result from categorisation. “Control” is used in the restricted sense of categorisation power, meaning who defines the attribution categories through which authorship becomes legible at the point of evaluation. Two boundary conditions specify when the mechanism is most consequential: high process opacity and platform-mediated exchange. The paper contributes by relocating the explanation from artefact-level creativity to attribution regimes and by clarifying how sociotechnical infrastructures mediate identity claims, legitimacy, and value allocation through visibility, ranking, and contracting in AI-mediated creative ecosystems.