Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI

With artificial intelligence making inroads into the arts, a critique of aesthetic AI still needs to be written. To this end, this article argues that first, one must do away with the "Promethean anxiety" that assesses machine-created works by the standards of human-made ones, and second,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inConfigurations (Baltimore, Md.) Vol. 30; no. 2; pp. 203 - 231
Main Author Bajohr, Hannes
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.03.2022
Subjects
Aesthetics
Algorithms
Anxiety
Artificial intelligence
Artists
Creativity
Electronic literature
Empathy
Machine learning
Neural networks
United States > US
California
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Summary:With artificial intelligence making inroads into the arts, a critique of aesthetic AI still needs to be written. To this end, this article argues that first, one must do away with the "Promethean anxiety" that assesses machine-created works by the standards of human-made ones, and second, one must turn to the technical substrate of such works for criteria of aesthetic critique. The article takes digital literature as an example and suggests a distinction between the "sequential paradigm" of linear algorithms and the "connectionist paradigm" of neural networks. Such media-specificity finds its aesthetic correlate in the medium-specificity of text and image.
ISSN:1063-1801
1080-6520
1080-6520
DOI:10.1353/con.2022.0011