Browsing by Author "Anscomb, Claire"

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    AI: artistic collaborator?
    (Springer, 2024-09-30) Anscomb, Claire
    Increasingly, artists describe the feeling of creating images with generative AI systems as like working with a “collaborator”—a term that is also common in the scholarly literature on AI image-generation. If it is appropriate to describe these dynamics in terms of collaboration, as I demonstrate, it is important to determine the form and nature of these joint efforts, given the appreciative relevance of different types of contribution to the production of an artwork. Accordingly, I examine three kinds of collaboration that can be found in the philosophical literature on artistic authorship—collective authorship, co-creatorship, and co-production—to determine whether human-AI interactions comprise joint efforts as per such kinds. As I find, collaboration is a concept that invokes rich psychological terms and so one to used be with care in relation to generative AI, which does not yet meet the conditions to count as an artistic collaborator in the senses derived from the literature. To progress discussions on ethical and legal issues that are raised by image-making practices involving generative AI, and further research into the distinctive qualities afforded by interactions with these systems, I argue that we ought to frame their contributions to the production of visual artworks in terms of a “generative” contribution and describe the interactions between humans and generative AI systems as “AI-assisted production”.
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    Beautiful Experiments in Art and Science
    (Routledge, 2023-06-16) Anscomb, Claire
    Scientific experiments and the artistic experiments of avant-garde artists are often praised for the simplicity or economy of their designs. In the former case, appreciators also tend to report a sense of pleasure, judging the work as beautiful. Curiously, this is typically absent in the latter case, despite shared properties like simplicity or economy. To explain these diverging responses to scientific and artistic experiments, this chapter examines different conceptions of beauty and whether they can accommodate the phenomena under discussion. From this, it is argued that a long-neglected conception of beauty, functional beauty, can account for the differing experiences reported by appreciators of artistic and scientific experiments.
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    Creating Art with AI
    (University of Pisa, 2022-08-24) Anscomb, Claire
    Computers appear to be working more autonomously than ever before to generate visual outputs, thanks to recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some humans have exhibited these products as artworks and given sole credit to these systems as the creators of them. Furthermore, human audiences who are unaware of the AI origins of the works have rated them higher than those produced by humans. Although these newer systems look creative in these cases, this impression is not enough to establish that the AIs are artistically creative. In this paper, I examine whether such AIs meet the conditions that would qualify them as creative agents and what the repercussions are of taking monist and pluralist conceptions of artistic value on the kind and share of credit that we grant an AI for its contribution to a work of visual art.
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    Creating Images with Generative AI: An Imaginative Aid
    (Routledge, 2024-08-01) Anscomb, Claire
    Increasingly, both public and professional creators are being assisted by generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems in the production of images. Concerns have been expressed about the potential for these technologies to decrease human creative agency or aesthetic diversity. To examine whether these concerns are warranted, the psychological and philosophical literature on creativity and imagination is examined. Drawing on this, two senses are distinguished in which generative AI systems can be used as imaginative aids: (1) to aid a user in visualizing an idea; and (2) to aid a user in cognitive play. The latter, unlike the former, is central to creativity and it is also rarer in the use of these systems. The case is made that to facilitate this kind of use more widely and ameliorate the aforementioned worries, the development of these systems ought to focus on not only technical improvements, such as greater control over elements like training data, but also attitudinal changes, so that users do not suffer from illusions of creatorship that may inhibit the development of their aesthetic aims and autonomy.
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    Creative Agency as Executive Agency: Grounding the Artistic Significance of Automatic Images
    (Oxford University Press, 2021-09-15) Anscomb, Claire
    This article examines the artistic potential of forms of image-making that involve registering the features of real objects using mind-independent processes. According to skeptics, these processes limit an agent’s intentional control over the features of the resultant “automatic images,” which in turn limits the artistic potential of the work, and the form as a whole. I argue that this is true only if intentional control is understood to mean that an agent produces the features of the work by their own bodily movements alone. Not only is this an unrealistic standard to uphold, but I show that a definition of intentional control based on the skeptic’s position does not prohibit an agent from realizing the features of an image by means beyond their own actions. An agent can exercise intentional control over the features of an image if they successfully anticipate the effect that the remote consequences of their actions will have on these. This, I argue, entails that to exert intentional control over the features of an image is to exercise “creative agency,” which is a species of executive agency. Consequently, I defend the idea that the origin of automatic images in creative agency grounds their artistic significance.
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    #filterdrop: Attending to Photographic Alterations
    (The Nordic Society for Aesthetics, 2023) Anscomb, Claire
    It is well-documented that the alteration of portrait photographs can have a negative impact on a viewer’s self-esteem. One might think that providing written disclaimers warning of alteration might help to mitigate this effect, yet empirical studies have shown that viewers continue to feel like what they are seeing is real, and thus attainable, despite knowing it is not. I propose that this cognitive dissonance occurs because disclaimers fail to show viewers how to look at the contents of a photographic image differently. Consequently, viewers have the same perceptual experience, where the picture appears to faithfully resemble a direct visual experience of the subject, which conflicts with their changing sense of warrant. However, I argue that the degree of perceived similarity, and so contact, may be subject to change depending on what a viewer is attentive to during their viewing of an image, including subtle but unrealistic signs of alteration.
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    Hybridized, Influenced, or Evolved? A Typology to Aid the Categorization of New and Developing Arts
    (Oxford University Press, 2023) Anscomb, Claire
    The category in which an artwork is received impacts its aesthetic significance. Yet, it can be unclear how to classify new and developing arts - particularly when they share features with pre-existing arts. One approach to conceiving of the relation between such arts is to discern whether they are hybrid art forms. However, this approach primarily focuses on the technical aspects of production, making it particularly difficult to classify digital arts, which often rely on shared technology and techniques. To rectify this and more effectively account for the ways that arts are hybridized, influenced, and evolved, I develop a typology that considers arts in terms of both techniques and norms for appreciation. In doing so, I establish an approach that better reflects the empirical facts of, and so can more accurately track the relevant distinctions between, different arts.
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    Look a Little (Chuck) Closer: Aesthetic Attention and the Contact Phenomenon
    (Oxford University Press, 2022-07-15) Anscomb, Claire
    There is a sustained phenomenological tradition of describing the character of photographic pictorial experience to consist in part of a feeling of contact with the subject of the photograph. Philosophers disagree, however, about the exact cause of the ‘contact phenomenon’ and whether there is a difference in the phenomenal character between the pictorial experiences of photographs and handmade pictures so that, if a viewer mistakes the type that a token image belongs to, their sense of contact can alter. I argue that the contact phenomenon is contingent upon, and triggered by, the viewer’s perceptual experience of the image, which may be subject to change depending upon how a viewer attends to an image. I develop a hybrid account to resolve how the perceptual and cognitive aspects of a viewer’s experience interact and produce the complex phenomenology, including conflicting mental states, that a viewer can undergo during the described experiences.
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    Visibility, creativity, and collective working practices in art and science
    (Springer, 2020-10-24) Anscomb, Claire
    Visual artists and scientists frequently employ the labour of assistants and technicians, however these workers generally receive little recognition for their contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. They are effectively “invisible”. This invisible status however, comes at the cost of a better understanding of artistic and scientific work, and improvements in artistic and scientific practice. To enhance understanding of artistic and scientific work, and these practices more broadly, it is vital to discern the nature of an assistant or technician’s contribution to the production of a work, which is difficult as it is uncommon to discuss these workers. To address this, I investigate how different kinds of parallel working arrangements in collective artistic and scientific practices affect the creative potential of individuals involved. Different working arrangements permit different degrees of autonomy for individuals involved in these practices. Significantly, a lack of autonomy precludes the opportunity to act spontaneously and so exercise, what I term, “creative agency”. Evaluating the contribution of an assistant or technician based on the degree of autonomy that they are granted in the production of a work is an approach that I show can be used to precisely determine the nature of their contribution to the production of a work and accordingly, what kind of recognition an agent should receive for this. Importantly, this approach has the advantage of explaining the artistic and epistemic significance of different kinds of contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work.
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    Why Draw Pictures That Already Exist? Photo-based Drawings and the Presence Phenomenon
    (Loughborough University, 2022-04-21) Anscomb, Claire
    It is widely held that, due to its causal nature, photography is the visual medium best suited for enabling individuals to form a sense of perceptual contact with distant or deceased subjects, and so to mitigate against the loss of the subject. Yet, a number of artists, who have meticulously recreated photographs by a slow, laborious process of drawing, have reported that this manual activity has afforded a richer sense of connectedness with the distant or lost subjects. In this article, I produce a phenomenological analysis of this experience, which I term the “presence phenomenon”. To explain this phenomenon, I employ recent work from philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind to argue that the act of drawing, unlike looking at a photograph, presents affordances for bodily action that, in combination with the realism of the work, trigger sub-doxastic associative mechanisms that produce an enhanced sense of connection to the subject.