“The discussion between [AI and] what is going on [in] the humanities has not happened often because people are scared,” Mark Allen, art chair and professor at Pomona College, said. “I think AI is a giant cultural disaster, but I think it’s great for art.”
On March 25, over 60 students and faculty members gathered at Claremont McKenna College’s Bauer Center to attend the “Art in the Age of AI” talk, organized by the 5C Artists’ Coalition (5C ArtCo) and the Pomona Student Union (PSU). The talk brought together Pomona professor Virginie Duzer of Romance Languages and Chair of Art Allen, as well as LMU Munich professor Dustin Stokes, to discuss the theoretical dimensions of the relationship between art and artificial intelligence.
“The discussion between [AI and] what is going on [in] the humanities has not happened often because people are scared,” Mark Allen, art chair and professor at Pomona College, said. “I think AI is a giant cultural disaster, but I think it’s great for art.”
As a philosopher specializing in cognitive science, Stokes began with a presentation on how generative AI learns. He described generative AI as a “black box” process with predictive inputs and outputs that people often cannot directly explain.
“[AI systems] have to learn language, and they learn language … by being exposed to tons of data and then making random adjustments to their parameters. And suddenly you get the emergence of sensitivity to things like differences in homophonic terms or linguistic relations,” Stokes said.
After this presentation, ArtCo co-president Maggie Zhang PO ’26 read aloud a variety of questions for the panel members to answer. Zhang’s questions ranged from public anxieties about AI to debates over how AI is affecting our understanding of authentic art.
“How can we address concerns about authenticity and meaning of art without relying on essentialist ideas about what counts as human?” Zhang said. “And does AI threaten the ontological status of art?”
Duzer — a professor of Romance Languages — drew parallels between these current anxieties and those sparked by the introduction of photography in the 19th century. She noted that while she did not necessarily consider AI and photography analogies, the comparison is useful for framing the question of what the public considers potentially dangerous and how to address it.
“I want us to go back to the beginning in the French literature of photography. [Charles] Baudelaire … was one of the first, and now, the most famous in the French canon to say that photography was dangerous,” Duzer said.
Stokes, from a philosophical lens, replied to the question by drawing a distinction concerning agency in creative endeavors.
“I think when you identify someone as creative, you’re praising them in a way that implies that they’re responsible for doing something,” Stokes said. “[Creativity is] anchored in the agency or autonomy of the creator.”
Zhang pressed against Stokes’ point: “I feel like if the question focuses on agency, though, then the question is [only] about the artist … and it’s not about the art.”
She followed up with a question about the relationship between art, the artist, and the context in which it is created.
“Why does context matter for artistic meaning and aesthetic experience, and does Al lack it in a meaningful sense?” Zhang asked.
Allen, as an artist, emphasized the relational nature of art in his response.
“It’s helpful to not think of art as something which solely exists in the object, but the interaction between the object, the context in which it’s made, and the context in which it’s talked about,” Allen said. “Can art be a banana taped on a wall? Can art be an empty room with the wind blowing through it?”
In response, Stokes asserted that we can’t define the value of art in terms of aesthetics, because individual aesthetic experience is subjective. It’s impossible for an object to be objectively “aesthetically” pleasing, and so the way that we judge ‘what is art’ cannot solely be defined in terms of aesthetic experience.
“You can have an aesthetic experience of almost anything: a sunset, a pizza, a good curry, a motorcycle, a Taylor Swift song,” Stokes said. “You can [even] have aesthetic experiences of AI products … That isn’t necessarily to say that you count it as art.”
Stokes’ comment sparked a debate among panelists about what aesthetic experience entails.
“I don’t like the [idea that one can have an] aesthetic experience of pizza … I would argue very contrary to that… I think that it’s important to think about art history.” Duzer said.
Duzer then passed out prints of Vermeer’s painting, “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” to the audience. She invited attendees to consider the specificity of aesthetic experience, focusing on their initial reactions to the piece.
“You don’t know anything about [the girl],” Duzer said. “There’s this moment where you are really lost in the pearl earring, and you’re staying there a long time. [It’s] aesthetically pleasing … [even] without context. [But] when you know where it was painted, when you know who she was … what this real earring meant … all these things [deepen the] aesthetic experience … we should feel… in front of an AI picture … something [to] be lacking.”
Zhang described the talk as an opportunity for audience members to recognize that seemingly unprecedented fears and skepticism about AI actually take on striking historical similarities to earlier anxieties about art.
“We wanted the panel to function as a discussion that moved beyond the simple narrative that ‘AI art isn’t real art’ or that the work that humans do will always be better,” Zhang said. “That’s not to say we want to be naive or excessively optimistic about AI. But it involves an existential confrontation with what we do, why we do it, and how we may continue to do it in the future.”
The talk closed with a Q&A session open to the audience, during which the panelists addressed questions.
Attendee Chloe Kiparsky SC ’29 expressed her appreciation for the talk as a uniquely interdisciplinary conversation on AI.
“I appreciated that all three of them came from different backgrounds and had different specialties,” Kiparsky said. “I think that [AI] is one of the most relevant and talked about things in the world … [it’s] something that’s going to be affecting the entire fabric of society.”
In addition to serving as co-president of the 5C Artists’ Coalition, Maggie Zhang PO ’26 is a photo editor at TSL.
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