“For it is evident that it is in esthetics that we ought to seek for the deepest characteristics of normative science, since esthetics, in dealing with the very ideal itself whose mere materialization engrosses the attention of practics and of logic, must contain the heart, soul, and spirit of normative science.” Peirce (1906, CP 5.551).
The question of the mere ontological (im-)possibility of “the” creative machine does usually obfuscate the performative and cultural changes emerging from collaborative collective human-AI aesthetics. Human-machine interaction, such as in multimodal language models and text-generators (e.g. GPT-3; OPEN AI Codex), NFT art generators, music/audio generators put forward questions of control of randomness, sampling creativity parameters, and computational models of aesthetic judgements. Recent computational approaches to arts using machine learning and deep learning technologies (e.g. CNN, RNN, GAN, Autoencoder, VAE, Transfer Learning) force us to reflect about how music, sounds, images, texts, (abductive) perceptive judgements and aesthetic categories are changed with the popularization of AI technologies. The same could be said about the use of AI to generate synthetic images, digital twins, and AI Avatars as well as the use of AI-driven technologies to decide on relevance and visibility in health and biological sciences, economy but also in entertainment and in the creative industries — all of those technological transformations pose unavoidable questions that demand inputs from various disciplines, including aesthetics and semiotics. Moreover, we witness a popularization of prompt engineering and massive applications of recommender systems, multimodal languages, gesture and image generators, synthetic media, and other data-and algorithm-driven (artificial) creativity platforms. This raises relevant questions concerning, for example, algorithmic politics, programmed sociality, commodification, discrimination, self-perception, values, imagination, habit change, novelty, discovery and meaning.
The purpose of this Special Issue on AI Aesthetics is to stimulate and promote research on the above-mentioned issues and related topics with approaches inspired by C. S. Peirce, pragmatism and semiotics.
Possible topics and questions include,
but are not restricted to:
-How has the aesthetic relation between human beings and machines changed recently?
-How have human creative behavior and practices changed with the raise of AI technologies?
-How could Peircean accounts of abduction, diagram and aesthetics elucidate questions about AI Aesthetic technologies?
-Can semiotics help to clarify notions of aesthetic style in the context of human-AI interactions?
-Will our AI-driven practices in arts and sciences change fundamental concepts such as creativity, discovery, novelty, aesthetics, and meaning?
-Can the notions of diagram and diagrammatic reasoning elucidate practices and issues of AI-driven aesthetic practices?
Submission of full papers: We accept papers written in Portuguese or English. Papers must be submitted Word file. Submissions must be suitable for blind review. Each submission should include: (1) the name of the author(s); (2) academic affiliation; (3) email address; (4) title of the paper; (5) abstract, in Portuguese and English, of no more than 150 words; (6) Papers of no more than 45 thousand characters with spaces. (7) 3-5 keywords; (8) a short bionote.
The deadline for the submission is June 15th, 2023.
For more information about the submission guidelines, you can access the following address: https://semeiosis.com.br/guidelines
Accepted papers will be available online (open access) in 2023.
Please name the file of your submission as AI AESTHETICS + Title. For example: for a paper entitled “Contributions from semiotics”, please name the file as AI AESTHETICS Contributions from semiotics.
Once again, we would like to thank for your collaboration and possible interest in submitting your papers.
With our best regards,
Alexander Gerner
Vinicius Jonas
Renata Souza