HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article
Front. Artif. Intell.
Sec. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Volume 8 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frai.2025.1551867
This article is part of the Research TopicNarrow and General Intelligence: Embodied, Self-Referential Social Cognition and Novelty Production in Humans, AI and RobotsView all 10 articles
Will artificial intelligence be a genius painter? --Arguments from Kant's aesthetics
Provisionally accepted
Liming Ge1
Paul Ziche2*- 1Department of Marxism, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China
- 2Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands, Netherlands
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AI art eliminates the boundaries between artists and non-artists to some extent. AI-produced works do indeed challenge our standard conceptions of art and of aesthetics: what about the role of the artist? What about productive imagination/creativity vs. algorithmic structures? What about doing something completely unexpected? In Kant's aesthetics, Kant distinguished between three types of persons, respectively a "blockhead", a "great mind" and a "genius". A more detailed analysis of these three different types of people can provide a perspective on the development of AI art. Kant also proposed two kinds of art, 'general art ' and 'beautiful art ' that can help humans assessing the status of artwork generated by AI art programs. After analysis, we found that AI art programs can only reach great minds but not geniuses. And AI art can only produce general art, not beautiful art. Therefore, AI art cannot be a genius painter.
Keywords: Ai art, Kant's Aesthetics, genius, creativity, beautiuful art
Received: 26 Dec 2024; Accepted: 15 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ge and Ziche. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Paul Ziche, Utrecht University, Utrecht, 3584 CS, Netherlands, Netherlands
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