AI and Aesthetics

Creative applications of AI indicate an important truth that we rarely acknowledge: aesthetics is not about some simple, sensibly based pleasurable response to phenomena.  At the risk of sounding critically antiquated in this age of ‘affect’ and ‘sensible distribution’, it is profoundly cultural and social. ‘Taste’ is a socially mediated construct.  Very simply, we like things because we have become acculturated to like them.  This is certainly true in the case of art – maybe less so simply in our relation to the experience of a flower, a beautiful bird, a sunset, etc (although these are clearly very conventional examples of beautiful things).  There are probably aspects of common human affordance that inform our experience of the beautiful, but they are of less significance that those features that are not primarily sensible and naturally attuned.  The beautiful is a language that we learn to understand and speak. It involves not only the particular but also features of the general.  Beauty is always typical – generalised from the particular to the general or vice versa.  While we like to mythologise aesthetics as working at the limit of cognition and leading us into a pure space of iterative uncertainty (Kant) or sensible delight, it actually works very much as AI works in terms of various aspects of formal recognition – coding experiences as aesthetic or not aesthetic, as in this aesthetic mode rather than another, etc.  It is formal and analytical more than it is simply, holistically, phenomenologically perceptual.  Actually, of course, if we were to be serious about our claims about the sensible character of aesthetics, we would need to consider how perception itself is coded and involves aspects of discrete representation and process.  But my focus is less on the science and biology of perception than aesthetics as a social and cultural system.  If AI can predictably identify and produce the beautiful, it is not because it is magically approximating the ineffable essence of the human but because the beautiful is already systemic and predictable through and through.  Which is to suggest that the human is not as we conceive it.  It is not constitutively distant from AI processing as we imagine, even if it does not employ the same statistical mechanisms and even if we are sentient and reflective in a way that is very different from the AI Turing machine.