Artistic Beauty in the face of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to explore the implications that the production of art generated by Artificial Intelligence has for the notion of artistic beauty. Since its appearance, AI art has been presented as a challenge to the very concept of art, understood essentially as a human production. Given that works of art created by artificial intelligence are a very recent phenomenon, there has not yet been much philosophical or aesthetic discussion on the matter and the scarce literature published so far focuses mainly on the question of artistic creativity. AI art’s capability to produce beautiful works is often used to demonstrate the creativity of these intelligent machines and the artistic status of this sort of production. However, the notion of artistic beauty is dependent on the notion of art, although, according to some of the most influential accounts on the matter, this is not an incidental attribute, but one that is bound up with the aims and meanings of artworks, which refer to the artists’ artistic intentions. Thus, it is worth asking whether artistic (meaningful) beauty can be assigned to worksmade by machines which do not have intentions of any kind.