Artificial Aesthetics: Generative AI, Art and Visual Media

Our book explores how generative AI is transforming our understanding of aesthetics, creativity, design, and art appreciation. It uses approaches from six fields. Emanuele brings perspectives from aesthetics, philosophy of art, and psychology of art. Lev contributes perspectives from media theory, digital culture studies, and computer science, as well as his four decades of experience as an artist creating digital media, including recent work with generative AI. This is the first time all these different perspectives have been combined to analyze cultural AI.

We started working on the book in the summer of 2019, exchanging many messages, commenting on each other’s ideas, and sharing section drafts. While each chapter is written by a single author, it incorporates our ongoing discussions.

Given the rapid evolution of generative AI and its wide-reaching impact on art and culture, we made the decision to release each chapter online as soon as it was finished. The first chapter was released in December 2021, and the last one in September 2024. After all chapters were completed, we did some further editing. This PDF combines these edited chapter versions. You can download it (along with possible future updates and additions) from this web page: