Diotima: The Marist Undergraduate Philosophy Journal
First, let us address the idea that art is constrained to humans because only we possess the emotional prerequisites to create it. This objection is fundamentally flawed because it assumes that the AI is the chief architect in this process – but it is not. The human that feeds in the prompts is. This objection mistakenly anthropomorphizes AI, trying to cast it as an actor in this scheme. But this is not the case; artificial intelligence is merely a tool the artist can utilize to produce a work that would otherwise be beyond their means. Like a paintbrush, artificial intelligence is an implement to be applied. No one (or, at least, I presume, very few) would say the artist’s brush has its own will that is violated or satisfied by the will of the artist; they are extensions of the work’s overarching architect. The brush conducts the emotions and can make them into reality, and artificial intelligence accomplishes the same. Even in cases where the artificial intelligence requires no user input, i.e., they have been programmed to automatically generate images, there is still a human factor in that the AI and its task would not exist without human input. Now, this is a complicated aesthetic problem, and I do not have the tools to address it, but I think it is worth considering the fact that art is a two-way experience. One part is the artist, the creator of the work, but the other part is the viewer, the audience. Should the sentiments of the audience not have some part to play in this debate? Next, there is the claim that artificial intelligence could never generate artwork that is of the same quality as a human. This is a complicated question because what even constitutes art is an unanswered question. Some believe that art has objective criteria, based on something such as harmony or unity, while others staunchly say it is all subjective. If art has objective criteria, there seems to be no reason that it could not meet such standards. As Mark Coeckelbergh writes: If what counts as art is a matter of objective criteria, it seems that machines may have a good chance to qualify as genuinely creative and as producing, especially if these criteria can be formalized. If there are objective criteria, we can try to program machines in such a way that they make things that meet the criteria. We can make code, based on the rules. Someone who evaluates whether machine art is really art, then, will ascribe art status to the product when it is clear in the product that the
Volume VII (2024) 5
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