The Philistine War on AI Art

AI art will supervene, is already supervening, upon several different categories of human endeavour — the clever technology-dependent stunt, the joke, divination — and will continue to please us and disappoint us in just the same way that these other endeavours do. It is simply not a meaningful question to ask whether any AI output may appropriately be categorised as art. Art is artifice plus, one hopes, a hint of genius, or something close to that. Such hints can shine through, as I’ve attempted to remind you, in the most unlikely, indeed the silliest places. There is of course no reason why AI should not also be such a place.