Can Artificial Intelligence Know about Beauty? – A Kantian Approach

Larissa Berger(Graduate student, University of Siegen)

It is a widely held view that beauty is not a property of objects being independent of human beings. Rather, feelings are supposed to be constitutive of beauty, a view that is prominently defended in Kant’s aesthetics. Furthermore, Kant holds that there are no rules of taste. In contrast, artificial intelligence (AI) at the current stage of development is not able to have feelings proper, but is only able to apply rules (algorithms). Hence, beauty poses a great challenge to AI. In this article, I will investigate the question of whether AI can know about beauty. Relying on a distinction between three phenomena – namely, the aesthetic experience, the judgment of taste, and the knowledge that an object is beautiful – I will differentiate three sub-questions: (1) Can AI have aesthetic experience? (2) Can AI make judgments of taste? (3) Can AI know about beauty? AI will eventually neither be able to have aesthetic experiences nor to make judgments of taste. Still, allowing for weak, empirical rules of taste AI should be able to know about beauty in a weak sense, i.e., identify beautiful objects with a certain likelihood.

Key words：artificial intelligence, aesthetic experience, beauty, feelings, judgments of taste, Kant