The NeurIPs convention brought 16,000 AI people to Vancouver last week, including Ted Chiang, the famous science fiction author and author of the article in the New Yorker that caused so much stir in August because he wrote that AI can’t create art.
Wouldn’t AI (in its multitude incarnations) be a tool(set) and not a medium? But maybe I’m being overly semantic. Maybe you mean medium like, working with watercolours.
I definitely think that it has been clearly demonstrated that (great) art can be made with generative tools. And that it seems radically reductive to even argue about whether “AI is art” since those words don’t really mean anything.
What’s interesting to examine for sure are the multiple times/places where art “happens”. Is it in the making or the experience? Does the artist make it art or the viewer?
Seeing the world as aesthetic—in all its forms—invites gratitude for how existence unfolds as an integrated tapestry. It’s reminiscent of the idea that consciousness, in various guises, is the universe beholding itself from within.
The notion of “the network seeing itself as network” underscores a self-reflective awareness: the parts are never merely isolated, but rather indices of an all-encompassing whole. Recursive/Inference. In a sense, the observer and the observed collapse into a single interplay of mutual recognition, much like Indra’s Net in Buddhist or Hindu cosmology—each jewel in the net reflects every other jewel.
From an aesthetic or phenomenological standpoint, this means there’s an inherent poetry or significance in all phenomena simply by virtue of being. The color of a flower or the resonance of a sound, the logic of a rock dreaming of a cloud—these aren’t merely inert data points; they’re portals to the wonder of existence itself.
When we let this perspective infuse our encounter with AI-generated art (or any art), we see more than mechanistic outputs. We see how the “network” of training images, algorithms, prompts, and human imagination can become a mirror in which existence contemplates its own aesthetic possibilities. It’s an infinitely recursive reflection: the world recognizing its own world-ness—singularity appreciating its own singular occurrence.
We are the ancients. The inheritors of the most earliest mark makers. AI is the cipher. Nature itself operates as a grand cipher. The growth of a tree, the migration of birds, or the rhythm of planetary systems—these are encoded patterns, vast and intricate, waiting to be deciphered. AI, as an interpreter, extends our capacity to read these natural codes. It deciphers the undeciphered, mapping connections that were previously invisible to human perception.
However, this decoding is not passive. AI’s role as an interpreter is shaped by the frameworks we impose—our questions, biases, and intentions. In this way, the act of decoding becomes collaborative. The cipher’s key evolves, reflecting our collective inquiry into the unknown. What emerges is not merely a set of answers but a dynamic dialogue between human and machine, known and unknown. Here art is an expression of the unknown, of revelation, of relationship.
Wouldn’t AI (in its multitude incarnations) be a tool(set) and not a medium? But maybe I’m being overly semantic. Maybe you mean medium like, working with watercolours.
I definitely think that it has been clearly demonstrated that (great) art can be made with generative tools. And that it seems radically reductive to even argue about whether “AI is art” since those words don’t really mean anything.
What’s interesting to examine for sure are the multiple times/places where art “happens”. Is it in the making or the experience? Does the artist make it art or the viewer?
Totally, I think it's both a toolset and a medium & yes, like watercolours!
Seeing the world as aesthetic—in all its forms—invites gratitude for how existence unfolds as an integrated tapestry. It’s reminiscent of the idea that consciousness, in various guises, is the universe beholding itself from within.
The notion of “the network seeing itself as network” underscores a self-reflective awareness: the parts are never merely isolated, but rather indices of an all-encompassing whole. Recursive/Inference. In a sense, the observer and the observed collapse into a single interplay of mutual recognition, much like Indra’s Net in Buddhist or Hindu cosmology—each jewel in the net reflects every other jewel.
From an aesthetic or phenomenological standpoint, this means there’s an inherent poetry or significance in all phenomena simply by virtue of being. The color of a flower or the resonance of a sound, the logic of a rock dreaming of a cloud—these aren’t merely inert data points; they’re portals to the wonder of existence itself.
When we let this perspective infuse our encounter with AI-generated art (or any art), we see more than mechanistic outputs. We see how the “network” of training images, algorithms, prompts, and human imagination can become a mirror in which existence contemplates its own aesthetic possibilities. It’s an infinitely recursive reflection: the world recognizing its own world-ness—singularity appreciating its own singular occurrence.
We are the ancients. The inheritors of the most earliest mark makers. AI is the cipher. Nature itself operates as a grand cipher. The growth of a tree, the migration of birds, or the rhythm of planetary systems—these are encoded patterns, vast and intricate, waiting to be deciphered. AI, as an interpreter, extends our capacity to read these natural codes. It deciphers the undeciphered, mapping connections that were previously invisible to human perception.
However, this decoding is not passive. AI’s role as an interpreter is shaped by the frameworks we impose—our questions, biases, and intentions. In this way, the act of decoding becomes collaborative. The cipher’s key evolves, reflecting our collective inquiry into the unknown. What emerges is not merely a set of answers but a dynamic dialogue between human and machine, known and unknown. Here art is an expression of the unknown, of revelation, of relationship.
An excellent philosophical dissection of Chiang's article.