Our project aims to explore the reception of AI-generated content. Using Critical Theory as a basis and analytical starting point in understanding forms of technological domination, we will rethink the role contemporary technology plays from the standpoint of the individual subject. We are interested in considering intimate, small-scale transformative impacts of generative AI. By infiltrating most online spheres, AI has transformed media. Users are confronted with changes in their everyday uses, including changes in appreciation of creative media, i.e. art. Texts from thinkers such as Marcuse, Ellul, Benjamin, and Nietzsche will provide analytical clues for our examination of the impacts of AI on interpersonal relationships, and for our examination of the flattening out of critical thought. From this philosophical grounding, we will discuss certain issues such as transformations in dominant language and symbolic production, the eros underlying chatbot structures, and new modes of intimacy in relating to ourselves and to otherness.

We will produce a short film that both applies and empirically challenges concepts derived from aesthetic theory and existentialist philosophy. The film will highlight differences between AI and human creatives processes as well as examining different ways of supplementing aesthetic experiences and artistic production with AI software and interfaces. This medium will enable a practical examination of the question of indiscernibility of artistic objects. As artificial intelligence promotes aesthetic telos and formalism, we propose a recentering of the artist. An anti-teleological examination of art may uncover key aspects of aesthetic experience. Following different local artists through image and sound, we will explore the strength and intimacy of the connection between them and their medium. By showcasing the context and setting of artists’ crafts, we aim to actualize our understanding of art as relational and explore edge cases of expression.