At the end of 2018 an artwork created by the Artificial Intelligence of the Obvious Group was sold at Christie’s auction. The resulting surprise, dismay and misinformation in the press have revealed how complex the idea of artificial intelligence is for the public and the art world. The work that makes use of artificial intelligence raises a multifaceted debate of enormous interest on the validity of the machine’s creativity, on the identity of the true artist and on the quality of the aesthetic results.
Philosophers, computer scientists, art historians, scholars and artists confronted with basic questions: what is creativity? And the art? Who is the craftsman and who is the spectator? Can machines be creative or is creativity just a human characteristic? Can the generative process of an artificial intelligence system be qualified as creative and original? How do we judge the works of art created with the mediation of the AI? Can we call algorithms that discriminate among millions of “works” aesthetic?