Discussion of Jessica Hullman, Ari Holtzman, and Andrew Gelman’s Article in Sankhya A: Artificial Intelligence and Aesthetic Judgment

We congratulate the authors on a timely, thought-provoking piece about artificial intelligence.The authors draw original and surprising connections between the outputs of generative AI on the one hand and pieces of art and an aesthetic judgment of them on the other hand.We appreciated especially the contrast between "the genius" and "the machine" described in Section 3.2.Three thoughts caught our attention in this section.First, the authors highlight the exaltation of the individual's role in creating artwork at the cost of "de-emphasiz[ing] any collaborative aspect of art."Indeed, this seems to be related to how credit is attributed in AI, putting few individuals on a pedestal while ignoring the fact that essentially all recent progress in AI was achieved by collaborative efforts, often across several large research labs.This is, of course, unfair to all those whose contributions have not been valued in the same way, but more importantly, it also puts a lot of power in the hands of few, those that receive all the credit, which seems risky in view of the present and imminent societal impact of AI.Another interesting thought is that not only AI is becoming more like humans, but also humans are sometimes seeking to be machine like.Who among us has not tried to be more "algorithmic" in housework, bureaucratic duties, or exam grading?Thus, we agree that one could argue for AI and humans somehow approaching each other, we feel that the movements from either end are based on very different principles.Let us focus on one particular aspect: Why?While a machine is become more like humans simply because it is trained like this, we are probably trying to be more machine-like