On the current role of Artificial Intelligence in the process of artistic production

Since the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, their pervasiveness has rapidly grown to the point of gaining access to one of the most typical among human activities, the one of art. In the latest years we have indeed witnessed advances outlining AI’s “creative” abilities, now finding applications in the fields of visual art, literature, poetry, and music. As a matter of fact, in many cases, people are no longer able to easily discern what is AI-made from what is human-made and show often a negative bias towards artistic products that are declared to be AI-made. Even though such technologies are capable of rapidly and efficiently generating images, texts, and music, that often are also pleasant, the history of art and aesthetics suggests that the works of art – those that we recognize as such over the centuries – have little to do with technical ability, and rather rely on aesthetic principles, of which the artwork per se is merely representative. We therefore propose to shed light on this topic, by redefining the phenomenon of AI participation in art as an important technical tool in support of the human artist's generative process.