AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism

In an era when AI-generated images flood our screens and algorithms shape our visual culture, how do we critically evaluate art made by machines? Nora N. Khan's study cuts through the hype and mystification surrounding AI art to explore the field’s stakes for art criticism. The book attempts to move beyond describing machine-generated images as mere dreams or hallucinations to develop rigorous frameworks for their aesthetic evaluation. Khan traces both the complex entanglements of human creativity and machine intelligence, and the evolution of the critical framing of this specific relationship. Neither technophobic nor uncritically celebratory of art and images made with AI, she argues for the development of new critical competencies adequate to our algorithmic age, proposing that we read AI images not as autonomous machine visions but as mirrors reflecting our own visual culture back to us, distorted and recombined according to computational logic. Accessibly written, her book will be essential reading for critics, curators, artists, and anyone seeking to understand how artificial intelligence is reshaping the very terms of aesthetic experience and cultural production.

The field of AI Art is a hotbed for uneasy partnerships between big tech, big art and critical culture. Not since Walter Benjamin's Age of Mechanical Reproduction has there been a similar challenge to humanist art criticism. This book examines how a contemporary critic should best engage with, contextualise and effectively critique machine-learning-based art. In considering this question, Nora Khan looks at the rush of institutions to place AI Art within an art-historical lineage while they simultaneously accept significant funding from technology companies. She discusses the scale and speed at which technological production, machine learning, and AI have abraded the individual’s capacity for critical evaluation, moving us to consider what a collective criticism of AI might look like.