Extended Aesthetics: Art and Artificial Intelligence

In this paper2 I will argue that developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applied to aesthetics have
relevant implications for philosophical aesthetics, in particular regarding the discussions about the nature of creativity and authorship. The
automatic generation of aesthetic artifacts, as well as the development of software that increasingly supports the work of artists and designers,
call into question the uniqueness of individual creativity and artistic imagination in an unpreceded way. Moreover, in a scenario in which
formal properties of artifacts seem to be easily replicable by machines, the debate on the relationship between aesthetics and the nature of art seems also revitalized. Overall, diverging positions on this issue oscillate between a view of the machine as an Other competing with human capabilities, and, on the contrary, an interpretation of technology as an extension of human potentialities through the externalization of mental processes. AI and machine learning would be in this sense a direct practical manifestation of an “extended aesthetic mind”, in which traditional cognitive limits of the biological mind can be overcome also in areas related to aesthetic creation.