Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology · Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology

Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė with Edoardo Chidichimo

·34 min·2 clips

The study found that beauty alone can make people call something art, even without intention.

1. Artery’s episode with Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė and Edoardo Chidichimo focuses on AI-generated art, authorship, and responsibility. 2. Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė is a research associate at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, and Eduardo Kirikimo introduces himself as a social anthropologist and computational neuroscientist. 3. The episode asks whether AI-generated artwork can count as art, who authors it, and whether language changes how people judge it. 4. The discussion opens with Edmond de Bellamy, an AI-generated portrait sold at Christie’s for US$432,500. 5. The artwork was made from some 15,000 portraits inspired by 14th-to-19th-century art, and the Parisian collective Obvious was criticized for not crediting the software package it repurposed. 6. Elzė says questions about AI art need three separate steps: what art is, what creation is, and what role AI plays. 7. She lists major philosophical definitions of art, including mimetic, expression, historical, intentional, procedural, and functional views. 8. The episode emphasizes that many of those definitions share one requirement: intentionality. 9. Elzė explains intentional action through examples such as dice-based aleatoric composition and a cat falling on piano keys. 10. She argues that accidental sound, even if pleasant, is not enough to count as a musical work. 11. Elzė then describes a study with Markus Knier on the “full concept of art,” using vignettes that varied intention, beauty, and institutional recognition. 12. Her study found that none of the three conditions was necessary in every case. 13. She says participants sometimes called something art even when it lacked intentional creation or museum recognition. 14. The most surprising result, she says, was that beauty alone could lead people to call an object art even when it was created accidentally. 15. The conversation returns to AI, and Elzė says respondents treat AI-generated output as art but do not treat AI as an artist. 16. She links that result to the refusal to ascribe intentions, wishes, beliefs, or other rich mental states to AI in aesthetic contexts. 17. Elzė compares current AI to a musical instrument, saying it is crucial to production but is neither composer nor performer. 18. She also says AI-creation debates raise legal questions about copyright, collective authorship, and responsibility. 19. The tone is analytic, interview-based, and tightly focused on philosophical distinctions, lab research, and legal implications. 20. Listeners interested in philosophy of art, anthropology, and AI authorship will get the most from it; listeners wanting a story-driven episode will probably skip it.

As heard by us

Artory explores AI authorship through art recognition, intention, and responsibility.

Artory treats AI authorship as a question of how art is recognized and who gets to claim it. The host and guest move through vignette-based tests that ask whether objects made intentionally or not, beautiful or not, and institutionally recognized or not, count as art.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you enjoy art theory with AI authorship in the corner, start here.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology