Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI

With artificial intelligence making inroads into the arts, a critique of aesthetic AI still needs to be written. To this end, this article argues that first, one must do away with the "Promethean anxiety" that assesses machine-created works by the standards of human-made ones, and second, one must turn to the technical substrate of such works for criteria of aesthetic critique. The article takes digital literature as an example and suggests a distinction between the "sequential paradigm" of linear algorithms and the "connectionist paradigm" of neural networks. Such media-specificity finds its aesthetic correlate in the medium-specificity of text and image.