Attah, Nuhu Osman
(2024)
The Work of Art in the Age of Automated Production.
[Preprint]
Abstract
This paper’s title alludes to Walter Benjamin’s famous essay in which he observes the advent of technology like the camera and other means of “mechanical reproduction” assessing their philosophical significance for art and culture. As his epigraph, Benjamin chose this quote of Paul Valéry’s: “Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present...But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the
ancient craft of the Beautiful.” Today, the advent of AI systems like Midjourney and DALL-E places us at a critical point in the interaction between culture and technology akin to that indicated by Benjamin and Valéry. These systems produce synthetic images from simple text descriptions, allowing for the generation of often high-quality art from simple text descriptions specifying the content and style of the desired output. These consequences of these technologies have already begun to ramify into our thinking about aesthetics, culture, and intelligence and necessitate a conceptual assessment of the changing landscape. There has been little philosophical recognition of this need (though see for instance Floridi 2018 for an exception). In this paper, I focus on the conceptual reassessment that might be required for our concept of creativity as a case-study in how we might respond to the philosophical reconfigurations occasioned by these technologies.
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[img]](https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/fileicons/text.png)
![[feed]](http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}