Mass AI-art: A Moderately Skeptical Perspective

Abstract This article introduces the term "mass AI-art" to describe the outputs of artificial intelligence image and music generators like DALL- E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, AIVA, and Suno. Mass AI-art is characterized by having minimal human involvement and being produced in the absence of knowledge of how the AI works. The article starts with the observation that people evidently take an aesthetic interest in mass AI-art and engage with it partly to have aesthetic experiences. Further, it seems, prima facie, that mass AI-art is just another sort of human art in this regard. Yet, the article argues that such experiences necessarily differ in important ways from the aesthetic experiences afforded by traditional, human-created art. The aesthetic experiences afforded by mass AI-art are more akin to those afforded by inorganic nature insofar as in both cases all aesthetically relevant properties – that is, properties that bear upon one’s aesthetic experience – are formal properties. Thus, a consequence of the argument is mass AI-art is not bona fide “art.” The second part of the article offers a defense of this idea, arguing that mass AI-art is not created with the sort of intentional control that is plausibly a necessary condition for arthood.