Abstract
As art produced by autonomous machines becomes increasingly common, and as such machines grow increasingly sophisticated, we risk a confusion between art produced by a person but mediated by a machine, and art produced by what might be legitimately considered a machine artist. This distinction will be examined here. In particular, my argument seeks to close a gap between, on one hand, a philosophically grounded theory of art and, on the other hand, theories concerned with behavior, intentionality, expression, and creativity in natural and artificial agents. This latter set of theories in some cases addresses creative behavior in relation to visual art, music, and literature, in the frequently overlapping contexts of philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. However, research in these areas does not typically address problems in the philosophy of art as a central line of inquiry. Similarly, the philosophy of art does not typically address issues pertaining to artificial agents.
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Notes
- 1.
Dennett makes a similar proposal (which he dismisses as unnecessary) for how one might try to experience a Bach cantata as an eighteenth century Leipziger would have experienced it: “To put ourselves into the very sequence of experiential states such a person would enjoy […] would require […] forgetting much of what we know, losing associations and habits, acquiring new habits and associations”. This would take place in “isolation from our contemporary culture – no listening to the radio, no reading about post-Bach political and social developments, and so forth” (Dennett 1991, pp. 441–442).
- 2.
It is interesting to note that the French word, conscience, may be used to mean either conscience or consciousness.
- 3.
Conscience also plays a role in Danto’s (1981) contention that artists must be morally responsible in their decisions about what to portray and how to portray it, which he explores in relation to the concept of the “psychic distance” an aesthetic attitude has from a practical one (pp. 21–24).
- 4.
This concept was mentioned briefly in Linson (2013) but, due to space limitations, was not addressed in depth.
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Linson, A. (2016). Machine Art or Machine Artists?: Dennett, Danto, and the Expressive Stance. In: Müller, V.C. (eds) Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 376. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26485-1_26
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