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Introduction
Gioia Laura Iannilli and Ossi Naukkarinen, with the collaboration of Enrico Glerean
Over the past few years, artificial intelligence, AI, has increasingly entered our everyday lives, and different versions of it are changing our political, medical, economic, creative, recreational, and many other practices. It is impossible not to use and be affected by AI because our cars, smartphones, social media platforms, factories, supply chains, electrical networks, and hospitals, among countless other things, are more and more dependent on it. There are fewer and fewer things that are not.
The broad field of aesthetics, spanning the whole varied spectrum of art-non-art, has also been affected by the growing AI family, and scholars of aesthetics have increasingly turned their attention to the implications of AI. On December 14, 2023, at the time we published our call for papers, Google search engine—a kind of AI—gave 3,020,000 000 results on the search “AI and art” and 405,000,000 on “AI and aesthetics,” and the numbers have been constantly growing since. If even a tiny fraction of all this is interesting and serious academic work, there’s too much of it, and that is why no one seems to have a full picture of this important phenomenon affecting us. Debates around it are way too broad and many-faceted to be understood in toto. However, if we are not ready to surrender completely, we must try to figure out, in some ways, what is happening. This special volume of Contemporary Aesthetics offers one interpretation of the ongoing, fast-moving discussion from the point of view of the years 2024–2025. Earlier accounts that influenced our initial plan to collect this package—on top of the literature mentioned in the articles and some of the millions of hits found by Google—include Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli’s Artificial Aesthetics: A Critical Guide to AI, Media and Design, Eduardo Navas’ The Rise of Metacreativity – An Aesthetics after Remix, and the debates on the website Aesthetics for Birds.[1] There is, of course, a much longer history behind the recent discussion, and it is partly discussed by Manovich and other authors just mentioned in addition to in the articles of this volume, but it is not our focus. Our aim is to understand contemporary aesthetics.
Often, though, the current debate is devoted to assessing the nature and value of AI-generated art. This special volume of Contemporary Aesthetics has a different and more tightly focused aim. We investigate how the phenomena and implications of AI affect a specific area of aesthetics, namely the academic discipline. The core questions orienting this special volume address the future of philosophical aesthetics. How will researching, writing, studying, learning, and teaching aesthetics happen in the age of AI? How to use AI responsibly, or sensibly, in an academic field that is challenged by these new, computational elements entering it after it has evolved in very different ways over the past centuries? What kinds of AI technologies are used now and will be in the future, and how will they transform our field? What will remain unchanged and why? In other words, the analyses in this volume collectively address the problem whether AI will or won’t, could or couldn’t, or should or shouldn’t change the field of academic aesthetics, that is, research and education of aesthetics carried out in universities and elsewhere.
The themes and questions we posed in the call for papers were the following:
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AI’s role beyond its traditional domains: What areas of AI traditionally applied to other fields of research can have a role in the development of academic aesthetics?
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Human-AI collaboration in aesthetics: What kind of contribution can or must the human agent provide in this framework?
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Enhancing aesthetics literature with AI: How can traditional and contemporary aesthetic literature benefit from AI-fueled research?
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Revisiting the history of aesthetics through AI: Is it possible to rewrite the history of aesthetics through AI?
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Educational transformation via AI: What are the educational implications of AI in the field of aesthetics?
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Potential risks of AI in aesthetics: What kinds of risks does AI bring?
The submissions we received covered these themes surprisingly well.
What this special volume of Contemporary Aesthetics brings together is a collection of points of view that have emerged in a certain historical period. Why do we emphasize the unavoidable contingency of our approach? Simply because things are changing so fast, and we don’t know exactly where AI will go even just in a year from now. Yet, the contributions selected for this special volume do offer a well-founded, carefully articulated analysis that makes sense now, and together they seem to share an interesting common thread pointing to a direction that we will explain below.
Despite the massive volume of accounts focusing on AI, aesthetics, and even combinations of the two, as far as we know nowhere else has a similar set of points of view been offered. What we provide is a selection of articles that connect AI with philosophers or classics of aesthetics, often in the visual and perceptual sphere, and that open technical aspects that affect our thinking and practices in aesthetics. The technical perspectives, especially, are not very often taken into account in philosophy, perhaps because many philosophers just don’t have the right knowledge base to do that. However, we believe that the widening of our perspectives in this way is necessary in this unprecedented era, for aesthetics, philosophy, and the humanities at large.
Even though there are at least these three main perspectives through which the topic of this special volume is addressed—classics of aesthetics, visuality, and technical aspects of AI—and even though within these three perspectives the points of view greatly vary, there is a common ground, or a common thread, that is not hard to spot: the authors generally agree that AI is indeed changing aesthetics as an academic field, and that changes are already taking place. There is no turning back or stopping the motion, even if this does not mean that everything will change. Moreover, changes are of many kinds and not simply bad or good, beneficial or otherwise, but both. We hope that this special volume makes at least some aspects of this changing process more evident and clear for those for whom it has not been obvious before—and perhaps even more urgently for those who might want to refuse to see what is happening, reject AI, and are mostly worried about a takeover of AI in the humanities.
On the other hand—as another ply in the common thread—the authors contributing to this special volume generally agree that humans and humanists are still crucially needed in this new, technologically imbued scenario. AI will not replace us any time soon, and many traditional aspects of academic aesthetics will remain relevant and valuable.
Without giving away too much of what the articles tackle, here we only provide a brief reading guide of them, organizing them in three macro-areas of interest, even though—as the titles of the papers also suggest—things sometimes overlap and are addressed in complex ways.
First, the readers will find contributions relating to classics of philosophy and focusing on how AI is affecting aesthetics and other fields, philosophical ones in particular. This first set of articles is opened by the article, “Preserving Meaning in an Age of Algorithms and AI,” by David L. Hildebrand. He addresses the question of how to preserve meaning and importance of the things around us when most of our practices, even academic ones, are mediated by AI-powered nudging of our actions. The theme is discussed through the lenses offered by such philosophers as Albert Borgman and John Dewey. “Human and AI Perspectives on Academic Aesthetics,” by Gioia Laura Iannilli and Ossi Naukkarinen, presents a novel perspective for categorizing both contemporary and historical cases of academic aesthetics, and outlines a series of questions that emerged during an interdisciplinary project aimed at comparing their human-made model with an AI-assisted one. This essay forms a pair with the article, “The Beauty and the Bit: AI-driven Philosophical Aesthetics,” by Stefano De Giorgis and Aldo Gangemi, introduced below. Tanya Ravn Ag’s “Anticipation and Aesthetics After Automation” draws from the concept of anticipation and employs it to emphasize the role of affective experiences and behavior in shaping evolutionary processes with AI technologies. Additionally, it points out a shift in aesthetics, where a focus on objects and outcomes is replaced by a focus on the processes through which they come to the fore and change. “Aesthetics in the Age of AI: A Methodological Self-Delineation,” by Anne Virginia Meindl, traces the current problems brought to the fore by AI back to a descriptive approach to aesthetics and to a Hegelian understanding of the artistic medium. It also aims at describing an appropriate usage of AI via the development of specific critical skills. David Holtgrave’s “An Agent or a Tool? Artificial Intelligence, Heidegger’s Robot and the Ignorant’s Toaster” provides a two-folded analysis of AI spanning a so-called agent view and a tool view of AI, respectively based on an original proposal of the author and the well-known analysis of the tool developed by Martin Heidegger. Finally, “The Mimesis of Difference: A Deleuzian Study of Generative AI in Artistic Production,” by Jakub Mácha, interprets the traditional notion of mimesis through a Deleuzian lens, in order to carry out an analysis of art generated by Large Language Models or Generative Pretrained Transformers, known as LLMs and GPTs, by emphasizing in both cases the ineliminability of the human component.
Another set of articles more directly focuses on visualizations and generative versions of AI. These articles address visual examples and visual arts and investigate how art and the visual world is affected by AI, even though they also take a stand on how AI affects philosophical aesthetics. “Is Generative AI in Aesthetics Really New? The Visualist Perspective,” by Michalle Gal, maintains through her “visualist philosophy” proposal that the visual sphere is the exemplar sphere through which it is possible to understand many aesthetic dynamics; and, as such, generative AI, in its intrinsically visual nature, can also be subsumed under this longstanding understanding of aesthetics. Maya Bak Herrie’s “On Deepfakes and Dog Whistles: Thinking Aesthetically about Generative AI” approaches the question of authenticity in relation to generative AI by arguing for an aesthetic analysis of generative AI processes where their complexity and “weirdness” are reshaping perception, also calling into question the so-called theories of agnotology. “Prompting Aesthetic Ideologies of Generative Text-to-Image AI,” by Lotte Philipsen, uses critical image theories developed in the 1980s and 1990s as a theoretical filter for analyzing specific cases of text-to-image prompting, to show that certain ideologies are currently inherent in generative AI.
Finally, we offer a selection of more technical papers that provide some possibilities for future aesthetics, namely for things that potentially will be needed in this field and only can be obtained through collaboration with other fields of knowledge, such as computer science, and through at least a partial update of the humanist’s skillset. This section is opened by “The Beauty and the Bit: AI-driven Philosophical Aesthetics,” by Stefano De Giorgis and Aldo Gangemi. Their article forms a pair with Iannilli and Naukkarinen’s essay and explains certain technical aspects of their article not included there, and presents a novel computational framework for formalizing and analyzing academic aesthetics discourse through the integration of knowledge representation techniques and large language models (LLMs). “AppraiSet: Discussions on a New Art Dataset,” by Thomas Serban von Davier, Max Van Kleek, and Nigel Shadbolt, provides a description of an open-source dataset of art metadata from published auctions. The aim of the description is to point out the opaque nature of proprietary algorithms, which poses challenges for understanding AI’s influence on aesthetics, as open-source data and code are seen as core for investigating how AI can develop its own aesthetic language. Finally, “Data-Mining and AI Visualization of Key Terms from U.S. Supreme Court Cases from 1789 to 2022,” by Eduardo Navas, Luke Meeken, Heidi Biggs, Kory J. Blose, and Robbie Fraleigh, using case studies from the U.S. Supreme Court, tackles the risks posed by AI by focusing on the often decontextualizing feature of generative AI models’ results. They point out that AI can be used as a tool to make research more specific and precise, but it can also be used to try to avoid in-depth research for quick results that appear assertive and accurate without really being that.
We want to thank all the authors as well as the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable work. Thanks to their insights, we are again a little bit wiser.
The editing process of this special volume is a good example of how working practices in aesthetics as an academic discipline are changing. Gioia Laura Iannilli and Ossi Naukkarinen are aestheticians with a traditional philosophical education and expertise, while Enrico Glerean is a computer scientist with deep knowledge of current computational technologies and interest in how AI is used in various contexts. Both perspectives are equally important when we try to understand what is going on around—and probably within—us.
Gioia Laura Iannilli
gioialaura.iannilli2@unibo.it
Gioia Laura Iannilli is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Bologna. She served in the Executive Committee of the Italian Society of Aesthetics and as the Secretary of the Experience Research Society. She has authored or edited the books John Dewey. Il senso delle qualità: saggi sulla percezione (2024), Co-operative Aesthetics. A Quasi-Manifesto for the 21st Century (2022), The Aesthetics of Experience Design. A Philosophical Essay (2020), and L’estetico e il quotidiano: design, Everyday Aesthetics, esperienza (2019).
Ossi Naukkarinen
naukkarinenossi@gmail.com
Ossi Naukkarinen is Professor of Aesthetics and former Vice-President of Aalto University, Finland. He is President of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics and the author of the books Aesthetics as Space (2020), Art of the Environment (2007), and Aesthetics of the Unavoidable (1998), and he has also published books and articles in, for example, Finnish, Italian, and Chinese. He is currently finalizing a book addressing the nature of the humanities.
Enrico Glerean
enrico.glerean@aalto.fi
Enrico Glerean is a staff scientist at Aalto University working on the technological aspects of ethics, responsible conduct of research, and data protection. He is a cofounder of the Finnish Reproducibility Network, and one of the organizers of the CodeRefinery workshops to teach best practices in computational research in the Nordics. He recently published a book for the European Data Protection Board on how to develop AI systems compliant with the GDPR.
Published on July 14, 2025.
Endnotes
[1] Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli, Artificial Aesthetics: A Critical Guide to AI, Media and Design, 2021–2024 at https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/artificial-aesthetics (accessed January 3, 2025); Eduardo Navas, The Rise of Metacreativity: An Aesthetics after Remix (New York: Routledge, 2023); “Aesthetics for birds” at https://aestheticsforbirds.com/, especially aestheticsforbirds.com/2023/11/02/eight-scholars-on-art-and-artificial-intelligence/ (accessed January 3, 2025). These publications also address the history of the relations between AI, aesthetics, and art.