The Aesthetics of AI Art: Funny, Uncanny, or just Plain Weird?

Helliwell, Alice C (2025) The Aesthetics of AI Art: Funny, Uncanny, or just Plain Weird? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. ISSN 1540-6245 (In Press)

Abstract

There are many ways we describe visual artworks: beautiful, sublime, ugly, disgusting, and so on. What about AI art? AI art nowadays can be indistinguishable from human-made works. But this is not always the case; a lot of AI art is weird. This paper makes a step towards an aesthetics of AI art. I propose that weirdness is central to this aesthetics. Weirdness, as I conceptualise it, is a form of norm violation. However, I argue that norm violation alone is insufficient to distinguish AI weirdness from other examples of norm violation in art (such as we might see in comedy or horror). Examining AI weirdness further suggests that it is not merely a violation of norms, but the result of some failure to reproduce something that is convincingly human. The weirdness in AI art thus stems from norm violation through non-human failure. I address a potential objection to my account of AI weirdness: AI images are not weird, they are uncanny. I argue that whilst some weird AI images may be appropriately described as uncanny, uncanniness cannot sufficiently explain all cases of weirdness in AI images. Weirdness, unlike uncanniness, does not require uncertainty, and can produce responses of amusement as well as anxiety. This, I argue, suggests that the weird and the uncanny are different, albeit overlapping, phenomena.

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