Artificial Intelligence and Aesthetic Judgment
Jessica Hullman, Ari Holtzman, Andrew Gelman

TL;DR
This paper explores how aesthetic judgments, shaped by art history and criticism, influence our interpretation of AI-generated art, raising questions about cultural reflection versus human essence and the implications for future perceptions.
Contribution
It analyzes the parallels between traditional art interpretation and AI-generated media, highlighting challenges in understanding AI art's cultural and human significance.
Findings
Generative AI outputs are mediated by aesthetic judgments similar to human art.
Historical art interpretation influences how we perceive AI-generated media.
Current interpretative modes may be insufficient for understanding AI art's meaning.
Abstract
Generative AIs produce creative outputs in the style of human expression. We argue that encounters with the outputs of modern generative AI models are mediated by the same kinds of aesthetic judgments that organize our interactions with artwork. The interpretation procedure we use on art we find in museums is not an innate human faculty, but one developed over history by disciplines such as art history and art criticism to fulfill certain social functions. This gives us pause when considering our reactions to generative AI, how we should approach this new medium, and why generative AI seems to incite so much fear about the future. We naturally inherit a conundrum of causal inference from the history of art: a work can be read as a symptom of the cultural conditions that influenced its creation while simultaneously being framed as a timeless, seemingly acausal distillation of an eternal…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAesthetic Perception and Analysis · Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis
MethodsFocus · Causal inference
