When Artificial Intelligence Participates in Creation: Aesthetic Authorship and Critical Frameworks for Generative Art
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64504/artsappreciation.v1i1.878Keywords:
generative art, aesthetic authorship, death of the author, stratified attribution model, AI art critical frameworkAbstract
The maturation and large-scale commercial deployment of generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) is systematically challenging the attribution of artistic subjectivity, the cognitive foundations of aesthetic judgment, and the evaluative standards of critical discourse. Taking Roland Barthes's "death of the author" and Michel Foucault's concept of the "author function" as theoretical points of departure, and integrating George Dickie's institutional theory of art, Nelson Goodman's symbolic aesthetics, and Helmut Leder's model of aesthetic information processing, this paper examines the theoretical challenges posed by generative art across three core dimensions: (1) the deconstruction of aesthetic authorship — how subjectivity is redistributed in human-machine co-creation; (2) the cognitive effects on aesthetic judgment — the systematic influence of "human-created" labeling on aesthetic evaluation; and (3) the reconstruction of critical frameworks — the applicability and limitations of existing art criticism tools when confronted with AI art. Drawing on Grba's (2022) critical framework for AI art and Bellaiche et al.'s (2023) cross-cultural experimental study as empirical support, the paper proposes a Stratified Attribution Model (SAM) that distinguishes three strata of subjectivity in AI art: an Intentional Layer (the human prompter/curator), a Procedural Layer (the algorithmic system and training data), and an Output Layer (the receptive community of the generated result). On this basis, a four-dimensional critical framework for generative art is constructed: intentional depth, algorithmic transparency, training data ethics, and receiver co-construction. The paper's central argument is that the aesthetic challenges of generative art do not announce the termination of artistic subjectivity, but rather compel art criticism to theoretically reconstruct subjectivity from the myth of individual genius toward distributed creative processes — a reconstruction that carries direct normative implications for contemporary arts education, copyright legislation, and critical practice.
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