Questions Left Unanswered

One question that was brought up in class that I still don’t have an answer for is can artificial intelligence make art? Even after all the class discussion and the Socrates Café event I am still stumped.

Going into the question I thought I was going to go off of the dictionary definition of art. The first definition that comes up when you look up art is “The conscious use of the imagination in the production of objects intended to be contemplated or appreciated as beautiful, as in the arrangement of forms, sounds, or words.” The main part of that stood out is the “conscious use of the imagination” aspect of the definition. This had me believing that AI can not create art because AI does not have a conscious or an imagination.

Then I had bit of a change in heart when I heard an argument that humans are the ones writing the code for these large language models. Then I also thought about how all the images that these models are training off of are also made from humans or are photographs taken by humans. So therefore if it was all already human made is the image being generated from humans?

I still cant come up with a definitive answer but I think I will continue thinking on for a long time to come. Clearly there is more to be made with AI in the future!