AI Art 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.