5 Beyond Human Aesthetics: Machine Hallucinations

Locating creativity in artworks that emerge from collaborations between boundless human imagination and complex algorithmic structures requires one to inhabit a territory of nebulousness and doubt. In this constantly evolving terrain of artistic production, artists often speak in metaphors to refer to new modes of perception and changing representational tools that they use to make sense of the world and our many realities. A curious metaphor that describes a neural network's unsupervised imaginings of new material based on the dataset it is trained with, “hallucinations,” captures both the definitional ambiguity and the representative complexity of such artistic productions. As a result, where to locate human creativity in an Al-human machine artistic collaboration has emerged as a question that perpetually forces critics and artists alike to reconsider the various definitions of creativity, authenticity, fakeness, and authorship. Alexander Reben, MIT-trained roboticist and artist, who defines the purpose of his human-machine symbiosis-based art practice as “probing the inherently human nature of the artificial,” claims that “AI art is still in the ‘ooo-shiny' phase,” and its initial ambiguities will be transformed into examples of fine art by those who use its tools “in a conceptually rigorous way” (Reben 2022). Engaging with AI tools in meaningful, ethical, and innovative ways and seeing the field as a platform of opportunities to enhance human artistic creativity instead of a space where human qualities and imperfections would be replaced by creative machines' precise and traceable outputs transports us, artists, to a future that stands still, waiting for us to arrive.