Why Disdain AI art?

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About the Author

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a prosecutor, and family at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.

This article is forthcoming in the March edition of Art Style: Art & Culture International Magazine

1. Introduction

Artificial intelligence can now produces images, music, and text quickly and with a level of ease that would have been inconceivable a decade ago. These systems mimic styles, extend traditions, and passably imitate works that once required years of human practice. And while AI replications are far from perfect, they are already very good—and, crucially, easy to scale. The suddenness of this transformation has forced the art world to confront a familiar puzzle in an unfamiliar form. If artistic value were grounded exclusively in the intrinsic properties of works—qualities like color, shape, or timbre—then the advent of AI would merely broaden the supply of aesthetically pleasing objects. Artificially produced works would stand in continuity with human ones, distinguished only by differences that should not matter. Yet the cultural reception of AI-generated art has been marked by ambivalence, suspicion, and, at times, outright rejection. Even when AI-generated pieces closely, if not perfectly, resemble human works, audiences often refuse to treat them in the same way once they discover that the source of the art is AI (Millet et al. 2023).

This resistance reveals a deeper tension. Human beings claim to care about art primarily for the beauty or insight it provides—its intrinsic properties—but they consistently behave as though something more is at stake. In The Elephant in the Brain (2018), Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson highlight this discrepancy by distinguishing between the stated and the actual motives underlying artistic practices, as revealed by the gap between what people claim to value about art and how they in fact behave (for example, what they are willing to spend money on). They argue that much artistic behavior—especially the attention lavished on extrinsic