AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism

In an era when AI-generated images flood our screens and algorithms shape our visual culture, how do we critically evaluate art made by machines? Nora N. Khan's study cuts through the hype and mystification surrounding AI art to explore the field’s stakes for art criticism. The book attempts to move beyond describing machine-generated images as mere dreams or hallucinations to develop rigorous frameworks for their aesthetic evaluation. Khan traces both the complex entanglements of human creativity and machine intelligence, and the evolution of the critical framing of this specific relationship. Neither technophobic nor uncritically celebratory of art and images made with AI, she argues for the development of new critical competencies adequate to our algorithmic age, proposing that we read AI images not as autonomous machine visions but as mirrors reflecting our own visual culture back to us, distorted and recombined according to computational logic. Accessibly written, her book will be essential reading for critics, curators, artists, and anyone seeking to understand how artificial intelligence is reshaping the very terms of aesthetic experience and cultural production.