#artificial-intelligence

In his groundbreaking 1935 text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,‘ Walter Benjamin questioned how photography and cinema radically transformed the nature of art. According to him, what made a work of art unique was its singular existence in time and space, its ‘aura’. Mechanical reproduction techniques shook this aura, detaching the work from its traditional context and offering it up for mass consumption. Today, we stand at a completely different threshold. Generative AI tools are…

​In this article, I will attempt a small intervention in contemporary artificial intelligence discussions with an old philosophical example. Our hypothesis is this: ​”Artificial intelligence is very powerful at defining and reproducing existing patterns. However, experiencing that which is not there, absence, negation, and nothingness, as a lived condition belongs exclusively to human consciousness.” Jean-Paul Sartre, in his famous “Cafe Example” from his 1943 work “Being and Nothingness“, describes the experience of someone entering a crowded cafe to find a…