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Abstract
Current debates on AI entering aesthetic practices often take on a normative stance by evaluating the artistic status of AI art. This article seeks to develop a different perspective by referring back to the original descriptive meaning of ‘aisthesis’ and also to the origins of aesthetics as discourse on the senses and art. Introducing a Hegelian understanding of the artistic medium—as formally modeling a certain structure of consciousness rather than just as a neutral means of representation—this article provides a methodological starting point of an aesthetically engaged critique of AI’s implicit subject model. Rather than operating with abstract definitions of human intelligence or creativity, aesthetics can provide us with the means to concretely analyze how AI as a medium is redistributing our modern space of perception and action, and in doing so it is not so much replicating human intelligence but reconfiguring it. Aesthetics in its descriptive sense therefore can deliver important insights concerning the appropriate use of machines and the critical skills that are necessary for this purpose.