Can artificial intelligence produce art? A political investigation

We are living in an era that artificial intelligence (AI) is open acess for many different disciplines in everyday life. Since one of those disciplines is aesthetics, AI claims to generate art. Although, this claim seems justified when these productions are examined by considering art purely formal, it seems to overlook the connections between aesthetics and politics, as well as the historical evolution of concepts from the perspective of history of art and aesthetics. The aim of this thesis is to explore the transformations of the concepts art and aesthetics throughout history and their links to politics, in order to demonstrate what claim of AI productions to be art means in politics. Therefore, first of all we will follow the concept of art through history of art. That will show that sometimes art has meant to produce functional products, sometimes it has meant to reach the most beautiful form and sometimes it has meant to open a gap for our gaze to find the world of ideas. We will emphasize in which circumstances these breakdowns occured. Then, we will move on to aesthetic theories starting with Kant and his critique of judgment. In Kant's opinions we will find taste and beautiful can only exist with sensus communis. Next, we will examine how Arendt finds political philosophy in Kant's critique of judgment. She will show us that we cannot drop spectator and actor when we are examining arts. In totalitarian regimes, she will claim that there cannot be any freedom for judgement. Then with Lyotard, we will mention about actor and spectator again but this time. He will claim that in the postmodern society there are many different spectator and actors that are constantly changing and promises many different consensuses. He will cal art in this society as art of sublime. However Ranciére will criticize Lyotard's numerous consensuses because he claims that in order to talk about politics and freedom, there need to be dissensus, not consensus. He assumes having consensus all over means to be in a totalitarian regime. Eventually we will examine the most common machine learning systems that are used for open access imge productions of AI. That will indicate that generating many different images for users is not producing art, but design. This will lead us to examine why is AI is assumed to generate art. In order to examine this claim, we will discuss about the spectator and actor in terms of AI. This discussion will indicate that this claim of AI generating art is a totalitarian interference to art which is the area of critical thinking referring to Arendt's, Lyotard's and finally, Ranciére's claims about art and politics.