AI Art, Machine Learning And The Stakes For Art Criticism

The field of AI Art is a hotbed for strange, 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 shared, collective criticism of AI might sound like.

Nora N. Khan is a writer, editor and curator with a particular interest in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Her previous books include Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2019), on the politics and future of machine vision.

Foreword; Introduction; 1 At the Intersection of Techno-utopianism and Techno-pessimism; 2 Ghosts of Sol LeWitt: Mystic Programming; 3 I See a Thing That Looks Like; 4 Mining the Uncanny; 5 Nudging, Scale, and Speed: Recognizing Technocratic Production; 6 The AI Art Exhibition; 7 Critical Translation: From Reveals to Measured Resistance; Notes; Further Reading; Index