Frameworks, interrogations, and conceptual terrain of artificial intelligence in relation to art and culture: A content analysis

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the focus of significant academic attention, yet relatively few works address its relationship to culture and to art. This is the focus of the article here, with central questions with regard to this interrelationship emerging from several recent texts on art, culture, and AI examined from the perspective of cognitive science, philosophy, and art itself. Such central questions are, “Can intelligent machines and programs be said to be creative and to produce true art?”; “What is the socioeconomic context of the rise of AI in relation to art and cultural production?”; How is artificial intelligence as an explanatory framework understood in relation to arts and culture?” and “Can an apparatus of artificial intelligence be an authorial subject in relation to a work of art?.” Critical examination of the questions across these significant but disciplinarily varied recent works in the area and others shows that such questions return back to philosophical uncertainties which already exist in the definitions of art and culture, but also that the development of AI art helps in turn to inform and alter questions about and answers to such basic philosophical questions about art and culture themselves.