Redefining the role of Artificial Intelligence in artistic production

Gagliardi, D. M.a,b,c*, Chiarella, S. G.a,d, Marenghi, F.a, Focareta, M.a,e, Cuono, Sa,c
and Torromino, G.a,g*

a
Numero Cromatico, Rome, Italy.
b
Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Department of Design and Applied Arts, Rome, Italy.
c
Quasar Institute for Advanced Design, Department of Communication and Graphic Design, Rome, Italy.
d
International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy.
e
Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA), Department of Communication and Graphic Design, Rome, Italy.
g
University of Naples Federico II, Department of Humanistic Studies, Naples, Italy.

* Corresponding authors.
E-mail addresses:
dionigimattiagagliardi@gmail.com (D. M. Gagliardi)
giulia.torromino@unina.it (G. Torromino).

ABSTRACT
Since the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, their pervasiveness has rapidly grown
to the point of gaining access to one of the most typical among human activities, the one of art. In the
latest years we have indeed witnessed advances outlining AI’s “creative” abilities, now finding
applications in the fields of visual art, literature, poetry, and music. As a matter of fact, in many cases,
people are no longer able to easily discern what is AI-made from what is human-made and show often
a negative bias towards artistic products that are declared to be AI-made. Even though such
technologies are capable of rapidly and efficiently generating images, texts, and music, that often are
also pleasant, the history of art and aesthetics suggests that the works of art – those that we recognize
as such over the centuries – have little to do with technical ability, and rather rely on aesthetic
principles, of which the artwork per se is merely representative. We therefore propose to shed light on
this topic, by redefining the phenomenon of AI participation in art as an important technical tool in
support of the human artist's generative process.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence (AI); art; aesthetic appreciation; authorship; negative bias.

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Introduction
When we think about what makes us humans, besides the common physical characteristics typical of
the species Homo sapiens, we recognize the highly developed abilities of our brain and the complex
variety of high-level cognitive functions, such as speech, abstract reasoning, and creativity. Although
these functions are partially recognizable also in other non-human species, they have mostly been
considered a prerogative of human beings to date. The rapid and sophisticated development of
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years is challenging this belief and generating a profound debate
often associated with prejudice towards AI, which is sometimes based on misconception and
imprecise information. It is true that the number of tasks AIs are able to successfully perform is
rapidly increasing, with some of them “threatening” the uniqueness of activities typically done by
humans, at least as we have intended it to this day. There exist AI systems capable of undertaking
several human tasks, whose applications have already been employed in fields such as customer
service, accounting, medical diagnostics, and image production. Perhaps one of the most astonishing
aspects of this growth is AI’s ability of “being creative” (Gagliardi et al., 2022; Eshraghian, 2020;
Gobet & Sala, 2019; Ihalainen, 2018; Mazzone & Elgammal, 2019; Miller, 2019; Pereira, 2007;
Boden, 1998).
To understand what this really means we should first operationalize creativity, which is a complex
task that goes beyond the scope of this manuscript. Besides its pure definition, creativity has been
often associated with artistic production, as well as with science – expressions characterized by
remarkable problem solving and abstraction abilities, which have long been acknowledged as
typically human.
Nowadays, there are many examples of AI systems that are able to “write” sonnets, poems, and texts
(Amabile, 2020; see Numero Cromatico 2021, 2022), “compose” music (Dannenberg, 2006; Gioti,
2021; Miranda, 1995) or “paint” both representational and abstract visual artworks (Boden, 1998;
Colton, 2012; Elgammal et al., 2017; Marzano & Novembre, 2017). This is likely to be the most
controversial aspect of AI, which translates into the key question that opens to our discussion: is it
correct – at least to this day – to acknowledge AI’s outputs per se as artworks?

The magnitude of the phenomenon, along with its resonance across the population worldwide, is
witnessed by the level of acknowledgment that AIs have already received to some extent from the art
system. Artworks realized with the implementation of AI, indeed, have been exhibited in important
museums, and have been sold by international auction houses for thousands of dollars (Goenaga,
2020). A case in point was the AI-generated artwork Edmond de Belamy – created by French
collective Obvious using a generative adversarial network (GAN) – sold in 2018 by Christie's New
York for $ 432,500 (Goenaga, 2020). Some authors have posited that we are living in a new era in
which artistic creativity is no longer an exclusively human domain (Arielli & Manovich, 2022; Baas
et al., 2015; Sternberg, 1999). Following the predictions of the founders of computer science
(Lovelace, 1843; Turing, 1950), this would suggest that complex algorithms can replace human
beings in an activity that has always been defined as a peculiarity of humankind. But again: is this
really the case? Does AI actually produce art?
In light of what is happening, it seems that both creativity and art creation can no longer be considered
within the paradigms investigated to date, or at least they should be studied with an interdisciplinary
and integrated approach, without leaving behind some important aesthetic and scientific issues which,
if not taken into account, could trivialize the discussion on this topic and create major misconceptions.
The relevance of this issue is testified by the increasing number of contributions in the scientific
literature tackling the new problems that generative AI can bring into our culture (see for instance:
Epstein et al., 2023; Vinchon et al., 2023).

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If we analyze our history of human beings, we realize that technological advances usually undergo an
initial phase of rejection by society before being accepted, like it was the case for photography in the
last century. The course of acceptance of new technological phenomena is possible also thanks to the
pioneering application that usually scientists and artists achieve, thus activating a process of
understanding and inclusion.

The paradigm of art beyond beauty

Although many people think that art is a universal and trans-historical phenomenon, history of art and
aesthetics suggests that it is actually not the case. Art expressions are always tightly connected to the
specific contemporary historical, geographical, social, and cultural contexts in which they are
produced; elements that, in turn, strongly characterize those works of art and make them children of
their time (Tatarkiewicz, 1979). In addition, at some point in their history, human beings started to
preserve such artifacts as being representative of their history and above all representative of specific
aesthetic principles. For these reasons, there are several types of art, categorized according to
historical periods, styles, and cultures, which, while always being expressions of the abstraction
ability typical of the human brain, are different according to the context and time in which those
brains were born and have developed.

Although the non-universality of art is pretty obvious to most art experts, and maybe even to those
who have not studied the history of art, today many people still think of art as something universal
and mostly related to the concept of beauty or to the formal quality of an artifact. In fact, this is not
the case. Talking about the aesthetic principles of all the art that has been produced by humankind
over time and in different socio-cultural contexts goes beyond our aim here. Thus, we will only
provide a few examples to clarify the reasons why artifacts made by AIs are not art per se.

By assuming that art can always be drawn to a specific epoch and historical culture, we must also
introduce the idea that art history is a history of “breaches” with paradigms belonging to the past. In
this perspective, works of art are what remains of and synthesizes those “breaches”. That is why art
today is far from both figurative representation of precise academic canons as in classical art
(historical paintings, mythological landscapes, official portraits, religious representations) and the
expression of the artist's inner reality, which has also led to more abstract and conceptual expressions
of art, typical of modern art (from Impressionism to Futurism, up to Neo-Plasticism, Spatialism,
Abstract Expressionism and Informal Art). Contemporary art is much more than a matter of style or
aesthetics, as it seeks to establish a new relationship with reality (Heinich, 2022). Consider Duchamp's
Readymades – they are objects taken from everyday life exhibited in a different context under a
different name (e.g. a urinal presented on a pedestal at an art exhibition with the title Fountain).

For an artifact to be considered “artistic”, it must represent a paradigm shift, embody some sort of
revolution. This consideration can be applied to art as well as science. Scientific discoveries to be
regarded as such must in a sense be “revolutions”, and for them to be considered “revolutions” a
certain number of conditions must occur: the existence of a collectivity, be it a large or a small group
that embraces that paradigm; the emergence of a controversy, which is an unsolvable one and not a
mere divergence of opinion, not only about the solution of the problem but on the very way of posing
it; an actual change in collective representations in response to that controversy (Kuhn, 1962). All the
artists and movements that we remember across both early and recent history do in fact meet these
conditions. However, they cannot be applied to AI per se, as they merely process data and create
artifacts as a consequence.

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The negative bias towards AI-produced art
To understand the role of AI in both creativity and art creation, an important issue to be tackled is
how people deal with AI products, in particular when they are employed to create artworks – being
them visual artworks, poems, or other art forms. Although a systematic investigation of this topic has
not been pursued yet (Arriagada, 2020), it has become central in recent years (Pelau et al., 2021;
Shneiderman, 2021; Peeters et al., 2021; Ding, 2022). Indeed, several studies in cognitive psychology
and neuroscience have revealed the existence of a negative bias towards AI art products at both
implicit and explicit levels (Millett et al., 2023; Chiarella et al., 2022; Sartori & Bocca, 2022; Fietta et
al., 2021; Liang & Lee, 2017; but see also Tomašev et al., 2020).
Human reaction to AI-creative products can be studied via two main approaches: 1) by investigating
humans’ ability to distinguish what is human-made from what is AI-made; 2) by evaluating whether
humans are biased when judging AI products. Due to the extremely evolved abilities of AI to create
high-quality images and texts, the first approach appears somehow outdated, as AI has already
overcome the challenge of the Turing test in different contexts (Köbis and Mossink, 2021; Hitsuwari
et al., 2022; Rebol et al., 2021; Tarnate et al., 2020; Xue, 2020). On the contrary, investigating human
biases towards AI products remains crucial in the face of the emerging potentialities of AI application
and their acceptance.

What history of art and neuroscience have acknowledged so far is that beauty and aesthetic
appreciation not only are not absolute values – but concepts affected by individual, cultural, and
contextual factors (e.g., Nadal & Chatterjee, 2019; Che et al., 2018; Pearce et al., 2016; Gallese & Di
Dio, 2012; Jacobsen, 2006) – they are also unnecessary to the artistic definition of artifacts. Even an
ugly or formally insignificant object (e.g. Duchamp's urinal or Manzoni's Artist's shit) can be
considered a work of art if it meets certain aesthetic principles that activate a cognitive relationship
with the viewer (Gagliardi, 2022b; Heinich, 2022; Vettese, 2012; Lombardo, 1987).
Based on factors such as individual history, context, contingent stimuli, and given information, the
codification and processing of an artwork varies from person to person and from moment to moment,
regardless of the objective characteristics of the manufact. All the aforementioned factors will
influence the person’s aesthetic appreciation and judgment of the artwork, influencing the viewer’s
aesthetic experience and the fate of the artwork itself.
As to how we respond to AI artifacts, several studies have reported that knowing that an artwork was
generated by an AI lowers its evaluation in terms of pleasantness. One of the first pieces of evidence
of a negative bias towards computer-generated images was reported by Kirk et al. in 2009. Authors
compared the aesthetic judgment of images either declared as derived from an art gallery or generated
through a computer using Photoshop and found that the computer-generated ones were valued as less
pleasing even if they were identical to those declared as belonging to an art gallery (Kirk et al., 2009).
In another study, it was found that participants’ aesthetic appreciation of the artwork was lower for
computer-generated artworks – unless they saw a robotic artist in action – and that participants
categorized the representational artworks more often as human-made than computer-made
(Chamberlain et al., 2018). A similar result for the categorization ability of participants was also
reported by Gangadharbatla (2022). Along the same lines, Ragot et al. (2020) showed that AI-made
artworks are valued as less beautiful, original, and meaningful than paintings presented as human-
made.
However, some research studies show contrasting results. For instance, an online survey conducted by
Hong and Curran (2019) showed that AI-created artworks were perceived as less beautiful, new, and

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meaningful than paintings presented as human-made, but in this case participants were able to discern
the author of the artworks. Nonetheless, similarly to other studies (Chamberlain et al., 2018;
Gangadharbatla, 2022), also Hong and Curran (2019) observed that abstract artworks were judged as
more appreciated when they were associated with AI, while the opposite occurred for representational
paintings. Another research reported that abstract paintings are perceived as more novel and
surprising when AI accompanies the title, while they report no difference in the judgment of
complexity, interestingness, and ambiguity (Israfilzade, 2020).
An interesting result was obtained in a study that investigated participants’ emotional response to
abstract paintings made by humans and AI: authors found that participants tended to give high scores
to AI-made paintings for the three positive emotions of joy, pleasure, and love, but that human-made
paintings elicited higher arousal and more intense emotional responses (Xu & Hsu, 2020).
It is intriguing the evidence that the negative bias towards AI can be lowered when people are given
the possibility to see the robot in action or in the case of non-representational artworks (Chamberlain
et al., 2018) and that it is influenced by emotion-related factors (Xu & Hsu, 2020). This suggests that
the aesthetic experience might be biased by factors like vitality and dynamism – which are more
easily associated with human traits – and a potential identification with the author of the artwork.
Indeed, one hypothesis to explain the contrasting evidence regarding the negative bias towards AI is
that the viewers’ judgment is biased by a comparison with a human-made artwork. Accordingly, we
have recently reported that only when participants judged a human-assigned abstract painting first
they gave lower scores to an AI-assigned artwork – but not when the opposite presentation order was
given – (Chiarella et al., 2022), meaning that AI is considered less valuable only when it comes to the
comparison with humans.

Similar results were obtained by studies inquiring about the perception of AI-made texts and poems.
A recent study by Köbis and Mossink (2021) showed through a new, upgraded version of the Turing
test that participants did not distinguish in a reliable manner texts written by AI from those written by
humans. They also showed a negative tendency towards AI-generated texts in cases of authorship’s
pre-assignment as well as non-assignment. Along the same lines, another study conducted on both
human- and AI-generated textual archives yielded comparable results (Darda et al., 2022): although
the difference in terms of “authorship” was not detected by participants, they nevertheless assigned a
lower value to AI-generated textual archives.
An additional case to be taken into account is that of active collaboration between humans and AI. In
this perspective, Hitsuwari et al. (2022) engaged 385 people in an experiment assessing the human-AI
collaboration in the production of haiku – traditional Japanese poems consisting of 17 syllables and 3
verses. The experiment illustrated a positive evaluation with respect to the collaboratively-written
texts, while confirming a negative evaluation of those produced exclusively by the algorithm,
although, also in this case, participants did not consistently recognize whether the texts were written
by AI or humans.

Overall, several studies contrasting human vs. computer- or AI-made artworks/texts in the field of arts
have reported the existence of a negative bias towards the latter, especially when the representational
ability or the capability to evoke emotions is to be judged. As aforementioned, the importance of
deeply understanding the reported negative bias lies in the fact that it negatively influences the
aesthetic experience of the viewers and this may, in turn, influence the value – both perceived and real
– of an artwork.

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AI-generated artworks: just a misconception?
Nowadays there exist several AI systems that can be employed to generate images and texts with easy
access to users from various backgrounds, not only experts or artists in this particular case. Defining
their capabilities and to what extent they can be considered artistic is not an easy task, yet a crucial
point in our discussion.

As far as images are concerned, generative adversarial networks (GANs) are often used to make
artwork reproductions (Aggarwall, 2018; Quintarelli et al., 2020). These neural networks learn from
large amounts of input images and use the acquired skills to generate completely new results. Another
type of algorithm used to create images is Text-to-image – also known as T2I –, which is rapidly
becoming more popular than GANs themselves (Qiao et al., 2019; Li et al., 2021; Lyu et al., 2022).
T2I is able to generate visually realistic images that match a given text description. In the last few
years, we have witnessed their surprisingly quick rise thanks to their versatile ability to produce
images that can aid the work of different communities of visual artist operators (Ko et al., 2023).
Some examples are DALL-E and Glide developed by OpenAI, and Imagen and Parti developed by
Google. Others are available as open-source projects like Craiyon or offer publicly available
interfaces to generate images like MidJourney.
As far as literature is concerned, the expression “poetry generation” usually refers to the AIs attempts
at writing poems, which started out with the advent of Digital Humanities halfway through the last
century and is now intended as part of Computational Creativity (Linardaki, 2022). As for image
generation, poetry generation is the result of an AI training process with a corpus of texts that leads to
the AI’s ability to generate brand-new poems.
With the onset of Digital Humanities and the first calculators by the second half of the 20th century,
outstanding examples are found of artists and writers exploiting the computational abilities of
technologies to generate literary materials. Love Letter Algorithm (1952) by Christopher Strachey is a
case in point: he covered notice boards at the University of Manchester with love letters generated by
means of the first computer on the market – Ferranti Mark 1. Also, for the Stochastic Texts by Theo
Lutz (1959) a Zuse Z22 computer was used. Nanni Balestrini's Tape Mark I (1961) should also be
mentioned, for which an IBM calculator and a few simple instructions were employed to create
random combinations to produce poetic texts.
Such experimenting, within the same field of action, flourished in the following years. At the
beginning of the ‘80s Paul Braffort and Jacques Roubard conceived the Atelier de Littérature Assistée
par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs (ALAMO), which translates to “Workshop of Literature
Assisted by Mathematics and Computers”. The advent of notebooks, digital imaging processing
softwares, and the Internet between the 1990s and the 2000s marked a turning point in paving the way
for the establishment of a deeper relationship between literature and new technologies (Davinio, 2002;
Morris and Swiss, 2006; O’Sullivan, 2019). In this framework, neologisms including "technopoetry"
(Davinio, 2002), “technotexts” (Morris & Swiss, 2006), and "electronic literature” (O’Sullivan, 2019)
were introduced. These refer precisely to those artists and writers playing with new technologies,
across different modalities, to generate literary materials.

The examples of AI systems mentioned above, especially those for poetry generation, are
intentionally taken from the work of artists or writers. However, it is important to highlight here that
the employment of free online AI tools by non-artist, hence regular users, is also a current possibility.
It is the case of free poetry generators such as Poem Generator, Language is a Virus or Poem
Portrait, which create poems starting from a few inputs (nouns, adjectives, basic metrics
requirements, etc.). Going well beyond poetry generation, a stunning evolution of text generation

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technology is the one fostered by Open AI in November 2022 with ChatGPT, an interactive chatbot
trained to return concise, sophisticated, detailed answers to input text prompts. The expectations about
ChatGPT are high and diversified, as it was suggested that powerful future versions of this bot will
help in various tasks - not specifically related to art - that could go even as far as writing scientific
grants and research manuscripts, or summarizing newer research directions (Kirmani, 2023). To date,
the capability of these algorithms is limited to the learning of existing data and interpolating
information, while they are not (yet) able to extrapolate knowledge, namely making discoveries
(Kirmani, 2023). As also hypothesized by experts in the field, it appears totally plausible that future
evolution of this type of algorithm will also challenge our unique extrapolating capability as humans
(Mitchell, 2023).

Besides the variety of AI systems readily accessible and freely available for producing images and
texts, a crucial point here is that it is not the technology that makes an artwork – no matter how
advanced and efficient –, but rather the artistic theory, approach, and design. Thus, we should clearly
distinguish between the use of these technologies for artistic vs non-artistic purposes. In the case of AI
employment for artistic production, there is a specific aim in the artist’s project related to equally
specific aesthetic theories (e.g. see Numero Cromatico, 2022b). Accordingly, several artists have
specifically fine-tuned AI systems for their purposes, such as in the examples reported above for
poetry generation. That is why we think that there might be a “misunderstanding” in the debate about
the role and participation of AI in artistic production.
Unraveling this misconception is important to re-equilibrate the debate around AI in the field of art,
with a possible mitigation of the negative bias towards AI-made artwork.

A case study to make a point on the understanding of the relationship between AI and art
What is the real role of AI in art generation? Should we put the “classic” artistic generative process
and the “new” one that sees the participation of AI at the same level?
To deeply address this issue here, we turn to Numero Cromatico – an art collective based in Rome
(Italy). The interest of Numero Cromatico is not addressed at creating artworks that respond to the
artist’s personal experience but rather at soliciting and exploring the emotional and cognitive reaction
of the public. One of Numero Cromatico’s key principles of the generative process of an artwork is
the concept of “expressive abstinence” - formalized by Sergio Lombardo in his Eventualist theory
(1987) and already part of a practice akin to various artistic movements of the last century. Expressive
abstinence embodies the ideal of minimizing the artist’s individual expression and conceiving
aesthetic devices embedded with potentially ambiguous, destabilizing, and polysemic characteristics
that solicit the public’s creativity and makes it the center of the artwork (Gagliardi, 2022b; Numero
Cromatico, 2022b; Lombardo, 1991; Lombardo, 1987). On the basis of this and other aesthetic
principles (Gagliardi 2022b; Numero Cromatico, 2022b), in its early years, Numero Cromatico has
designed and realized works of art to be intended as aesthetic stimuli. Since 2019, the collective has
drawn upon the employment of AI among the tools at its disposal for the realization of works of art.
In this perspective, “implementing AI creativity as a tool for creating artworks” does not imply that
those artworks are AI-made, nor does it make an artist out of AI, since the general idea and aim of the
projects are conceived by the artist per se, namely Numero Cromatico, who is also responsible for
fine-tuning the AI according to specific parameters.

The exhibition project Tre Scenari sulla Percezione del Tempo (translated to “Three Scenarios on the
Perception of Time” and from here on abbreviated with TSPT) formed a ground for experimenting
with the aforementioned principles. TSPT consisted of three consecutive exhibitions – namely Atto I:

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La Memoria [Act I: Memory], Atto II: La Visione [Act II: Vision], and Atto III: L'Attesa [Act III:
Waiting] – that took place in Numero Cromatico’s project space in Rome (see Fig. 1A-C), from June
2021 until June 2022, also later presented at MAXXI Museum in Rome (December 2021 / August
2022).
The three exhibitions have been an attempt at enacting an “ecological” coexistence between natural
and artificial elements, including AI. The experience was meant to be all-absorbing: viewers found
themselves immersed in a “scenario” able to solicit both bottom-up – sensory-driven – and top-down
– cognitive-dependent – responses. In such a context, the viewer was implicitly invited to enact a
spontaneous relationship with the AI element that prompted reflection while triggering different
contrasting feelings. In all three exhibitions, there were artworks consisting of large panels –
positioned across the space – bearing the poems generated through the use of the AIs fine-tuned by
the collective.

Figure 1. The exhibition project Tre Scenari sulla Percezione del Tempo by Numero Cromatico.
A. Atto I: La Memoria (Act I: Memory), contained poems developed by the AI P.O.E. in the form of
epitaphs. B. Atto II: La Visione (Act II: Vision) showed love poems written by the AI I.L.Y.. C. Atto
III: L'Attesa (Act III: Waiting) showed poems on the future of humanity, generated by the AI
S.O.H.N. All the AIs were GPT-2 fine-tuned by Numero Cromatico. See the text for more details.
Photographs from Numero Cromatico’s archive.

In the first scenario (Fig. 1A), the space was set up with ten artworks of different sizes composed of
mosaics of real flowers (Limonium Sinuatum). The artworks contained texts generated by P.O.E.
(acronym for Poetry Of the End), an AI fine-tuned by Numero Cromatico to generate epitaphs, poems
on the end, epigrams, and memorial texts. In the second scenario (Fig. 1B), the space was set up with
ten artworks of different sizes, consisting of tapestries representing texts generated by an AI called
I.L.Y. (acronym for I Love You), trained by Numero Cromatico to generate love poems. In the third
scenario (Fig. 1C), the space was set up with nine artworks of different sizes, which consisted of
panels covered with monochrome or multi-colored carded wool that resembled a plumage, displaying
textual contents on the future of humanity generated by a third AI called S.O.N.H. (acronym for
Statements Of a New Humanity), trained by Numero Cromatico. The three AI generators were built on
a Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) – an open-source AI created in 2019 by OpenAI –
starting from three separate corpora of selected texts.

In TSPT the algorithm was attuned to the necessary aesthetic and perceptual requirements of the artist,
making the AI a regular tool at the artist’s disposal. Hence, AI did not interfere with creativity, nor did
it replace the artist. Rather, it was used to support the artist’s creative process, being a technology
capable of responding to a precise aesthetic, human-conceived approach.

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Discussion

The pervasiveness of artificial intelligence affects almost all areas of everyday life. AI algorithms are
embedded in our daily routine through everyday music, film, art, or news recommendation systems
giving us suggestions on what to listen, watch, visit, or read, conditioning our individual choices.
There is also a level of interference in decision making which is not only personal, but collective:
politics, education, healthcare, and cybersecurity domains are evermore reliant on AI in decision-
making (Triberti et al., 2020; Bickley et al., 2022; Giordano et al., 2021; Poel et al., 2018;
Ransbotham et al., 2021; Medaglia et al., 2023). Discussing these topics is important and urgent in a
society that dichotomically entrusts us to AI decisions in different fields (Bickley et al., 2022;
Giordano et al., 2021; Poel et al., 2018; Ransbotham et al., 2021), while simultaneously being
skeptical in relying on AI systems.

In this direction, knowledge and approaches from different disciplines, such as neuroscience,
psychology, and human-computer interaction, are pivotal in developing new tools for the
implementation of efficient communicative strategies to foster the relationship between humans and
AI. “eXplainable Artificial Intelligence” (commonly abbreviated as XAI) is a new field that aims at
improving AI’s transparency, understandability, trust, usability, and fairness (Miller, 2019). The goal
is to have users better equipped to understand and therefore trust and relate with these intelligent
agents (for a review see Haque et al., 2023). Being able to properly use AI potential and being aware
of its limitations are goals to be achieved, that also concern the field of art.

As we attempted to describe, AI implementation in artistic production should be clarified by intending

it as a tool, namely a support for the creative process, similarly to other artificial or natural tools. Over
the course of history, human inventions have proliferated exponentially – AI is the latest device
allowing for the production of novel verbal or visual stimuli to be used in the field of art. AI is neither
special nor provocative, merely one of the most recent human creations.
The fact that AI can create aesthetically refined images or that it can even generate content and
meaning turns out to be a Copernican revolution in the artistic field, but, for the time being, this is not
sufficient for this technology to replace human creativity. This transition in the artistic creative
paradigm should promote a necessary debate on the status of art and its fruition as it happened with
the spread, for instance, of photography at the end of the 19th century (Savedoff, 2000). In those
years, with the advent of technologies able to reproduce reality, artists began to question the role of
painting, giving rise to an unprecedented debate and the birth of historical avant-gardes such as
Impressionism, Futurism, Expressionism, and many others (Hacking & Lukitsh, 2020; Pierce, 1998).
As the potential of learning and “reasoning” of AI is in continuous evolution, this technology will
surely push our cultural boundaries towards new horizons (Jackson, 2017; Manovich & Arielli, 2021).
The latest concerns in AIs advancements relate to the issue of consciousness, as some scholars opened
to this scenario as a possible evolution in the near future, while others are more skeptical that this
could ever happen. Nonetheless, these kinds of concerns recall an urgent need for discussion on these
themes to better understand how to deal with AI still respecting our human nature (see Seth, 2023).

Despite the great advancements of AI abilities, people still struggle with fear, distrust, and prejudice
when dealing with it. As previously illustrated, data from literature about how people react to AI
products suggest that we are not fully prepared to welcome them. Research studies exploring why we
are still negatively biased towards AI products are thus needed to overcome such feelings and
promote a non-biassed interaction, also aimed at a re-evaluation of art products created with AI (note:
not by AI). This bias may be due to several reasons, including: the fear for such technologies solicited

9
by the unsettling feeling of not knowing how far they can extend; the generalized idea that art is the
result of the artist's content and not of specific aesthetic paradigms; it follows the lack of an emotional
nature that we associate with such technologies. All these biases possibly cooperate in the (wrong)
trend of assigning to AI a more important role than its actual one in art, namely that of a tool.

Whenever a new technological advancement is achieved, its explanation must be given to both experts
and the wider public of non-experts, in order to promote awareness and knowledge of the
phenomenon at hand, so that the new instrument can be better integrated into society’s life. It is
therefore crucial to come up with new communication approaches that aim at providing a new,
unbiased, and ecological relationship between humans and AI agents. This process might take
advantage of the understanding of the use and implementation of AI in art, being one of the most
unique among human activities.
Since the onset of AI in the 50s, its applications were mainly aimed at increasing productivity, by
allocating resources more efficiently and promoting innovation (Medaglia et al., 2023).

A new paradigm can only affirm itself if it generates a breach with the past, which will probably be, in
turn, supplanted in the future. This is how scientific and artistic revolutions occur, not through a linear
and continuous progression of knowledge, but through a series of breaches and evolutionary leaps.
Until now, this capacity has been the domain of the human brain, a machine that evolved over
100,000 years. In the near future, could such revolutionary leaps be the domain of “intelligent”
algorithms, of “machines” that have a few decades under their belt? This remains to be determined.

Now, we need to understand how, to what extent, and when AI can and should be integrated and
harnessed in the field of art and more generally in the relationship with our species – and not only –
through an evolutionary perspective.

The natural/artificial dichotomy should be dismantled as actually irrelevant with respect to the
discoveries and challenges we are facing. The idea that a work of art is the result of the artist's inner
sensitivity or that an artifact represents a certain kind of formal beauty draws from outdated ideals. In
our perspective, we urge to unhinge these conceptions in order to deal with artistic issues through new
approaches and, above all, for the purpose of inventing new paradigms of art in which the support of
AI is reckoned.

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Matteo Maioli for his help in preparing the draft manuscript and all the other
members of Numero Cromatico for helpful discussions and comments on the issue addressed in this
manuscript. The ideas expressed here represent those of the research group of Numero Cromatico.

Funding
This work was supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity by the Italian
Ministry of Culture grant “Italian Council X” awarded to Numero Cromatico.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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