AI-Generated Art

AI-generated paintings now sell at auction houses for significant money alongside human-created art. They have even been receiving broad critical acclaim. All this has sparked heated debates about the role of AI in the art world and on the nature of visual art and creativity itself. This trend has also raised the same type of questions discussed throughout this book: Is an AI painting a work of true art in the usual sense? What meaning is built into it? How would we interpret it historically and hermeneutically? These are the kinds of questions addressed in this chapter. Like the pop art movement that emerged in the late 1940s, AI art challenges us to penetrate the raison d’être of art itself and why it even exists in human life. Walter Benjamin formulated his famous notion of the “aura” in the 1930s to descry the modern world’s penchant for the mechanical reproduction and mindless mimicry of art forms, claiming that this was part of an ever-growing profane democratization of art, leading to the loss of the notions of originality and authenticity. If AI artworks are now being appreciated like human-created ones, with little distinction, where is the aura? Does it even make sense?