Artificial Aesthetics and Aesthetic Machine Attention
Artificial Aesthetics and Aesthetic Machine Attention

Summary/Abstract: The aesthetics of artificial intelligence is often viewed in relation to the qualitiesof their generated expressions. However, aesthetics could have a broader role in developingmachine perception. One of the main areas of expertise in aesthetics is the understanding offeature-based information, which involves how the aesthetics of sensory features can causeaffective changes in the perceiver, and the other way around – how affective states can give riseto certain kinds of aesthetic features. This two-way link between aesthetic features and affectsis not yet well-established in the interdisciplinary discussion; however, according to perceptualpsychology, it fundamentally constructs the human experience.Machine attention is an emerging technique in machine learning that is most often used intasks like object detection, visual question answering, and language translation. Modern useof technology most often focuses on creating object-based attention through linguistic categories,although the models could also be utilized for nonverbal attention. This paper proposesthe following perceptual conditions for aesthetic machine attention: 1) acknowledging thatsomething appears (aesthetic detection); 2) suspension of judgment (aesthetic recognition);and 3) making the incident explicit with expression (aesthetic identification and amplification).These aspects are developed through an interdisciplinary reflection of literature fromthe fields of aesthetics, perceptual psychology, and machine learning. The paper does not aimto give a general account of aesthetic perception but to expand the interdisciplinary theory ofaesthetics and specify the role of aesthetics among other disciplines at the heart of the technologicaldevelopment of the human future.

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