Addendum to: Beauty, Human Creativity and A.I.

Einstein said once that he wished to make the most beautiful equations, and he had a strong aesthetic sense of pattern and symmetry in the physical world. God does not play dice with the universe he famously said. You might see in these remarks his appreciation for the beauty of the universe, or at least for the way it was put together – for its deep structure. You might also say that a sense of beauty inspired his mathematical work. You might say that beauty was an accelerant to his creativity. What does the subject of beauty have to do with creativity and A.I.?

The philosopher Elain Scarry writes that beauty begets more beauty by inspiring creativity (1999). It can stoke a desire on the part of creative people to emulate and surpass the beauty of a creation through their own creative efforts. In this sense beauty is fruitful. But beauty takes many forms. It has many different qualities and it inspires many sorts of emotions. Einstein’s remarks resonate with historical definitions that emphasize beauty’s formal, measurable structural qualities. We think of the Pythagoreans and their mystifications of number, proportion and symmetry. We think of Chinese philosophy and the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy. We think of the symmetrical proportions of ancient Greek sculpture and architecture, of Italian Renaissance architecture and painting and of classical Chinese architecture. Critics of formal aesthetic descriptions of beauty point out that many objectively symmetrical buildings, sculptures are never-the-less objectively ugly. When confronted by the beauty of majestic mountain ranges or sunsets or storms or other natural phenomena observers do not parse or observe symmetry and balance. Rather, they experience emotions such as awe and excitement. Beauty of this type can be disruptive as it halts “the usual flow of thinking” or perhaps halts thinking altogether and provides a “never before in the world” experience, a sense of originality and newness and yet at the same time a sense of eternal “truth”. Philosophers write of how beauty can seem both new and old even archetypal.

Vadim (2024) speaks about Artificial intelligence in formalist, structural terms. He writes that A.I.’s algorithms and technological advancements may constitute an emergent form of beauty. This is part of what he calls digital beauty, which is being continually refined by engineers and designers as they find inspiration in skillful renditions of virtual reality landscapes or game designs or the sleek designs of new iPhones or in the extravagant technical capacities of luxury cars. Vadim (2024) suggests that the inclination toward artificial or digital beauty “marks a significant cultural moment that encapsulates the interplay between technology, social norms and the human desire for aesthetic enhancement”. This may sound somewhat worrisome, especially when considering the use of AI in cosmetic realms such as plastic surgery or even cosmetology. Also, using A.I. to ferret out and establish new cosmetic ideals, or in another realm, the digital architectural landscapes of the Metaverse, that appear most compelling and beautiful to people may not always be the most creative moves. These ideals can render average, pleasing, even hegemonic beauty forms that we might classify as being merely pretty or unchallenging, and not very creative. People can have what philosophers and psychologists call fluency with and familiarity with these forms. They are “unlikely to tax or threaten the individual’s understanding of the world”. In commercial fields such as cosmetology and cosmetics this is how AI is often being used.

A promising direction for A.I. would be to use it to discover new forms of what Kant referred to as free beauty. This is a higher order form of beauty, going beyond the simply pleasurable or pretty. These are more difficult phenomena that confront the observer (or participant, if he is endeavoring to create such a phenomenon) as being harder to apprehend at first. When confronted with such phenomena the mind tracks back to find analogies to understand them and it then moves forward to create an understanding of the new beauty forms, objects or experiences. Here imagination and interpretation come into play and beauty “becomes an emotion” (Armstrong:2008). This is a feeling, like exhilaration, that something complex and new might yield to understanding”. It is probably this feeling that accelerated Einstein’s desire to create “the most beautiful equations”. Or perhaps it inspired him as he worked to create these equations.

What role can A.I. play in facilitating such experiences in practical contexts such as architectural design, musical harmony composition, or even in the design of the virtual reality landscapes. We know that A.I. is good at pattern cataloguing, with presenting creative people with the raw data to think and feel with. It then is incumbent upon them to leverage the elements of human creativity discussed previously in this essay to create the Kantian category of “free beauty” in a variety of fields.

Digital, or formalist beauty need not be cold and anti-human or anti-humane. Renaissance art for instance, for all its stress on perspective, symmetry, measurement and spatial geometry ultimately broadcast a humanist message. This message stressed the centrality of human feeling and the significance and beauty of human gesture, as found in graceful and emotionally resonant activities such as dance or preaching (Baxandall 1974). In fact, scientific/mathematical advancements enabled the heightened realism of Renaissance art making possible a deeply moving expression of the human drama.

From a certain perspective one could say that digital beauty is no more designed, programmed and engineered than Italian Renaissance art. Then as now superior craft and technical abilities opened up a greater range for expression. This is the hope for A.I., as it was for the development of perspective in the Renaissance.

I wish to return to my initial observation that there are many types of beauty besides formal, intellectualist ones. Eco’s great work on beauty catalogues many of these from formal, structuralist ideals to romantic, emotionalist beauty ideals, from Apollonian to Dionysian ideas of beauty (2004). Eco discusses the beauty of color and light in the Middle Ages, the sublime and its relation to beauty, the beauty of machines and of everyday objects. Anthropologists have discussed the cultural dimensions of beauty ideas and the practice of art, pointing to the culturally relative dimensions of beauty. Can A.I. help us add new entrees to this catalogue of beauty types and help us create new experiences of beauty?

The subject of beauty, creativity and A.I. is virtually limitless. But so also is the subject of ugliness, stupidity, digital pollution and A.I. In a recent NY Times article David Wallace-Wells asks: How long will A.I.’s slop era last?

A.I. has produced boatloads of meaningless non-factual slop, giving recommendations such as “Elmer’s Glue should be added to pizza sauce” or that geologists advise eating at least one rock per day or that George Washington was Black. I recently came upon an A.I. summary of my “scientific contributions” to anthropology and was astounded by the description of what I have been about these last thirty-five years or so. It was way, way off and also sometimes nonsensical. An important task for A.I. application at present is to begin to reduce the digital pollution A.I. has created. In this practical way we can begin to move toward something that might be called digital beauty.

References

Armstrong, Thomas, Brian Delweiler. 2008. “Beauty as an Emotion: the Exhilarating Challenge of Mastering a Challenging World”. In. Review of General Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 4 305-329

Baxandall, Michael 1974. Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Eco, Umberto 2004. On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea. Secker and Warburg.

Laudas Alexandros, Mehaffy Michael, Salangaros Nikos. 2023. “A.I., The Beauty of Places and the Metaverse: Beyond Geometrical Fundamentalism”. In Architectural Intelligence.

Scarry, Elain 1999. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Vadim, Meyl, 2024. “Artificial Intelligence and the Metamorphosis of Beauty”. In Open Journal of Philosophy Vol 14 No.1

Wallace-Wells, David July 24th 2024. “How long will A.I.’s slop Era last”? In. The New York Times