By The Epoch Times | Created at 2025-03-13 20:03:25 | Updated at 2025-03-14 09:54:39
14 hours ago
Mihai Nadin said computers merely imitate what already exists without creating anything new.
Mihai Nadin, a scholar and researcher in aesthetics and human-computer interaction, warns of the rise of computer-generated art and its implications.
“If you expect any machine in the world ... to produce art, then you don’t understand what art is,” he said. “Art is made by artists. Art is not made by machines.”
The Romanian American professor discussed computer-generated images and technology’s impact on culture and art in a recent episode of EpochTV’s Bay Area Innovators program.
Nadin has studied electrical engineering, computer science, and computational design. He has written numerous books and articles on such subjects over the years and given lectures around the world.
Nadin said computers merely imitate what already exists without creating anything new. He said the imitation of art does not make an artist but is just plagiarism.
“They can only generate imitations of what we call art, but never produce a work of art,” he said. “It’s not creative. It’s a mechanical process.”
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He expanded on the importance of creation, saying that computers create the illusion that imitation is enough to qualify as art, and an artist should be able to use anything in the world, with or without computers, to create art.
He added that while all machines of the past were of interest to artists, they can only help as tools in the creative process but aren’t able to replace it.
In one of his recent articles, “The Age of the Fake—the New Normal,” Nadin referenced “Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial,” an AI-generated image that won first place in the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition in the digital art category. It was one of the first AI images to win such a prize.
Recently, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired its first AI-generated photograph, “Cristian en el Amor de Calle.”
In January, amid growing acceptance and popularity of AI-generated art, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that AI-generated art with “insufficient human control” cannot be copyrighted since it doesn’t meet the requirement of human authorship.
Nadin said with the absence of a serious aesthetic education, people are starting to accept fake art, which is becoming increasingly normalized.
“The life of art comes from interactions between art works and those willing to remake them in the experience of art perception,” he wrote in his article. “Inquiry [can] be inspiring or it can lead to a dead end.”
He gave the example of chess.
“At this moment the game of chess has absolutely no artistry left, because all the games of chess were played by the computer,” he said.
When machines create illusions, he said, it’s the machine—not the art—that is meant to be celebrated.
He said the act of creating a work of art is like an act of love.
“The machine is dealing with the what, while art is dealing with the why,” he said.
