The Human Automaton and the Chess Player: Reflections on Artificial Intelligence and its Application in Art

Abstract

In Adorno and Horkheimer's (1985) Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947, we see the discussion of the relations between the administered world, capitalism in a state of aporia, and the aporia of reason, whose artistic reflection is found in the formation of a cultural industry that is both comforting and alienating, which repeats in the film the social syntax in its full functionalism, which operates as a mirror for the merely functional, mechanized individual. The authors had not foreseen that the automation of man would be followed by an effort to rationally autonomize the machine itself. Until the 1950s, this design was more the preserve of fiction, which, whether in Edgar Allan Poe's automaton or in the lunar visits of the characters of H. G. Wells and Georges Méliès, questioned the future before it existed. Today, in the full force of the future, however, it becomes more difficult to question it, and questions are blocked by the demand for realism, which is in fact the acceptance not only of the given, but of its function within a single rationality. In the interest of questioning the present and future of the autonomization of machines through artificial intelligence (AI), we will therefore discuss its implementation in art. We will consider its functioning and human cognition, initially, to understand the epistemological commitments that determine the idea of a supposed equality between artificial and human intelligence, and then move on to the study of the aesthetic consequences, marginally, of its use in artistic production. We intend to demonstrate a unity between the tendency towards the autonomization of the machine and the tendency towards the automation of the human.