Art Notions in the Age of (Mis)anthropic AI

Abstract

In this paper, I take the cultural effects of generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) as a context for examining a broader perspective of AI’s impact on contemporary art notions. After the introductory overview of generative AI, I summarize the distinct but often confused aspects of art notions and review the principal lines in which AI influences them: the strategic normalization of AI through art, the representation of AI art in the artworld, academia, and AI research, and the mutual permeability of art and kitsch in the digital culture. I connect these notional factors with the conceptual and ideological substrate of the computer science and AI industry, which blends the machinic agency fetishism, the equalization of computers and humans, the sociotechnical blindness, and cyberlibertarianism. The overtones of alienation, sociopathy, and misanthropy in the disparate but somehow coalescing philosophical premises, technical ideas, and political views in this substrate remain underexposed in AI studies so, in the closing discussion, I outline their manifestations in generative AI and introduce several viewpoints for a further critique of AI’s cultural zeitgeist. They add a touch of skepticism to pondering how technological trends change our understanding of art and in which directions they stir its social, economic, and political roles.