Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Special Volumes
Abstract
Be it in art, aesthetics, or anywhere in or beyond academia, artificial intelligence, or AI, often is said to do a lot of stuff formerly done by humans. In this essay, I will argue that this line of thinking is to some extent misleading. On my account, it is still humans that do the same stuff, only by different means. Taking its employment and discussion in the arts as an example, I will set up and discuss what I call the ‘agent view’ of AI and show how, for those cases in which we typically attribute agency to AI, this attribution can and should be reduced to a lack of practical knowledge. For an alternative description of what AI is, I then give account of AI as a tool in the spirit of Heidegger’s analysis of tools. With both the agent and the tool view of AI in hand, I finally show how our understanding of questions about AI’s role and employment in art, aesthetics, or any sort of context begs for different kinds of answers, depending on whether we take the agent or the tool view as a premise.