Is AI Art Really Art?
Thoughts that keep coming to mind while creating images with AI
📚 Terms Worth Knowing First
"What determines what art is, is ultimately us.
If an algorithm produces something that moves us or makes us think,
whether to call it art is ultimately up to us."
"Commercial art isn't art," "The final product is just a receipt," "Art is 100% human," "Typing prompts can't be art" — these claims exist. But when you examine art history, current practices, and discussions by the best theorists, these claims fall apart.
📖 AI Art Through the Lens of Art Theory
If you claim that "art exists only in human creative acts" while dismissing graphics, commercial design, and AI images as "mere decoration," that's smuggling in a definition and declaring victory. The problem is that the broader art world, past and present, doesn't use that definition.
🎭 Major Art Theorists
1️⃣ John Dewey: Art as Experience
"The actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience."
Art isn't sealed in the artist's studio. It's completed in the encounter between what's made and the viewer.
2️⃣ Marcel Duchamp: The Creative Act
"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world."
If reception participates in creation, declaring the finished work irrelevant goes against a century of practice.
3️⃣ Arthur Danto: The Artworld
"To see something as art requires an atmosphere of art theory."
That atmosphere is social — critics, curators, audiences — not a blood test for carbon-based hands.
4️⃣ George Dickie: Institutional Theory
Art is an artifact that has had "candidate for appreciation" status conferred upon it by the art world. So urinals, recipes, poems, wall drawings — and yes, AI outputs — can become art when included in practices that confer that status.
🏛️ AI Art Already Being Recognized
📊 Institutional Evidence:
- MoMA: Acquired Refik Anadol's "Unsupervised" for permanent collection — an AI system trained on MoMA's collection data
- Christie's: Sold the GAN portrait "Edmond de Belamy" for $432,500 in 2018
- Sotheby's: Auctioned Mario Klingemann's "Memories of Passersby I" installation
- History: Harold Cohen's AARON software has been painting in museums for 50 years
🛡️ Responses to Common Criticisms
💬 "Typing prompts isn't art"
Sometimes that might be true. However, "minimal gesture, maximum meaning" has deep precedent. Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt: "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art." His wall drawings are certificates of instructions executed by teams — logic first, hands later — and they're in major museums.
💬 "AI images are plagiarism"
Two things can be true at once: we need to build consent/attribution tools, and learning from culture to create new culture isn't the same as copying. "Photography is just a machine" was the 19th-century complaint. The camera didn't end art — it expanded it.
💬 "Only human intent creates meaning"
First, meaning is distributed. Even an anonymously printed novel still has meaning. Second, even if the model contributes, there's a human stack: designer → data → training regime → prompt engineering → curation → selection. This isn't absence of intent, it's intent spread across the system.
📚 Art Theories and AI
Reviewing various art theories, none of them explicitly require a human creator:
| Theory | Core Idea | AI Application |
|---|---|---|
| Mimesis | Art is imitation of nature/life | AI imitates styles from training data ✅ |
| Formalism | Significant form creates aesthetic emotion | AI outputs can have formal beauty ✅ |
| Expressionism | Art is communication of emotion | If the audience is moved, function is fulfilled ✅ |
| Institutional Theory | If the art world recognizes it, it's art | Already recognized in museums/auctions ✅ |
| Experiential Theory | Art is completed in experience | AI installations provide immersive experiences ✅ |
🎨 Conclusion
If you insist that only certain kinds of handwork count as art, that argument isn't defending art — it's narrowing it until it flatters one workflow.
Art is not a static birthright of one tool or one profession. It's a social practice that spans paintings, posters, equations, buildings, meals — and images made with machines.
You can dislike AI-mediated work (taste is allowed) —
but declaring it "not art" is asking the entire art world
to forget a century of reasoning and 50 years of algorithmic practice.
That's not criticism. That's nostalgia dressed as ontology.
"Even if the brush isn't held in a human hand,
that painting can still move a human soul."
