AI and Changing Aesthetics

Often, the current debate is devoted to assessing the nature and value of AI-generated art. This special volume of Contemporary Aesthetics has a different and more tightly focused aim. We investigate how the phenomena and implications of AI affect a specific area of aesthetics, namely the academic discipline. The core questions orienting this special volume address the future of philosophical aesthetics. How will researching, writing, studying, learning, and teaching aesthetics happen in the age of AI? How to use AI responsibly, or sensibly, in an academic field that is challenged by these new, computational elements entering it after it has evolved in very different ways over the past centuries? What kinds of AI technologies are used now and will be in the future, and how will they transform our field? What will remain unchanged and why? In other words, the analyses in this volume collectively address the problem whether AI will or won’t, could or couldn’t, or should or shouldn’t change the field of academic aesthetics, that is, research and education of aesthetics carried out in universities and elsewhere.