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Cited by 265Art, Technology, and CultureCybernetics and Technology in SocietyDigital Media and Visual Art

The DOI matches its Crossref record, with a small difference in title or year; 36 of the 38 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Can Computers Create Art?

Open access
Hertzmann, Aaron·2018·Arts
DOI 10.3390/arts7020018
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Abstract

This essay discusses whether computers, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), could create art. First, the history of technologies that automated aspects of art is surveyed, including photography and animation. In each case, there were initial fears and denial of the technology, followed by a blossoming of new creative and professional opportunities for artists. The current hype and reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for art making is then discussed, together with predictions about how AI tools will be used. It is then speculated about whether it could ever happen that AI systems could be credited with authorship of artwork. It is theorized that art is something created by social agents, and so computers cannot be credited with authorship of art in our current understanding. A few ways that this could change are also hypothesized.

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Citations

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Show all 38 references

Research works printed but not linked: 13

  1. Brooks, 2017, The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions, MIT Technology Review, 120, 79
  2. Cohen, Harold (2018, May 09). ACM SIGGRAPH Awards—Harold Cohen, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement. Available online: https://youtu.be/_Xbt8lzWxIQ?t=13m20s.
  3. Dickie, 1969, Defining Art, American Philosophical Quarterly, 6, 253
  4. Carroll, Noel (2000). But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art. Theories of Art Today, University of Wisconsin Press.
  5. Dutton, Denis (2009). The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, Bloomsbury Press.
  6. Shechtman, 2016, StyLit: Illumination-guided Example-based Stylization of 3D Renderings, ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 35, 92:1
  7. Carroll, Noel (2000). Art as a Cluster Concept. Theories of Art Today, University of Wisconsin Press.
  8. Goodfellow, Ian J., Pouget-Abadie, Jean, Mirza, Mehdi, Xu, Bing, Warde-Farley, David, Ozair, Sherjil, Courville, Aaron, and Bengio, Yoshua (, January December). Generative Adversarial Nets. Paper presented at the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Montreal, QC, Canada.
  9. Hertzmann, Aaron (2001). Algorithms for Rendering in Artistic Styles. [Ph.D. thesis, New York University].
  10. Koblin, Aaron Michael (, January October). The Sheep Market. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C ’09), Berkeley, CA, USA.
  11. Rosenblum, Naomi (1984). A World History of Photography, Abbeville Press.
  12. Scharf, Aaron (1968). Art and Photography, Penguin.
  13. Sternberger, Paul Spencer (2001). Between Amateur & Aesthete: The Legimitization of Photography as Art in America, 1880–1900, University of New Mexico Press.

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Metadata

Authors
Hertzmann, A.
Affiliations
Adobe Research, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA
Corresponding author
Hertzmann, Aaron
ORCID
Hertzmann, Aaron
Venue
Arts
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2018-05-10
Volume
7
Issue
2
Pages
18
ISSN
2076-0752 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.3390/arts7020018
OpenAlex
W2963820570
Cited by
265
References
38
Citations by year
2026: 50 · 2025: 49 · 2024: 46 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 25 · 2021: 18 · 2020: 19 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 2
FWCI
213.93
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Arts (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • TSpace (University of Toronto) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Art, Technology, and Culture
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Cybernetics and Technology in Society
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design › Digital Media and Visual Art
Keywords
artificial intelligence in art, computer art, photography, animation, social agency

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