Artificial Intelligence has no experience of #beauty beyond its exposure to the corpus of training data with which its neural network weights and biases are programmatically refined. Despite this, it can return to us an image which we recognise as being in some way beautiful. The question that occurs to me is that of whether beauty is independent of the observer (and phenomenological experience) or platform and manifest application of its formulation or fabrication, is it then actually something akin to an eternal (Platonic) form? If it is not in this way transcendent, is beauty simply our reflexive attraction towards a face or a shape and symmetry imprinted upon us as much by our phenomenological, psychological and cultural experience as is an aesthetic approximationtion encoded into a high-dimensional latent image space from which a generative AI model produces visual artefacts with which to seduce our perception?
I don’t really think these concepts are as simple as I have tried to portray them here but they do persist as fascinating food for thought.
Image: stable diffusion.
Daedelus Kite 