Date/Time
Thursday
6 Nov 2025
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
470 Stephens Hall
Event Type
Colloquium
Thomas Hofweber
William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
It is tempting to think that AI will never produce any works of art that are of aesthetic value, let alone ones comparable to or even surpassing the greatest works produced by humans. However, it is not so clear what precisely the reason is for this limitation of AI, which has already surpassed human performance in other areas. I will discuss several possible in principle limitations to the aesthetic value of AI generated works, and conclude that although some limits are legitimate, the overall negative stance is nonetheless unjustified. But the purely techno-optimist stance that AI will be better than humans at everything is also unjustified. The question remains how one might build an AI that specifically aims to produce works of great aesthetic value. I will outline how one might do this and argue that a particular feature of aesthetic value allows for the application of reinforcement learning in the training of such an AI. Finally, I will discuss some obstacles for this approach and outline what we might expect for the future of art.
Thomas Hofweber is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor at UNC with a primary appointment in philosophy and a secondary appointment in data science. Professor Hofweber is also the Director of Graduate Admissions. He is the author of two books with Oxford University Press, as well as numerous article. He works in various philosophical areas, in particular metaphysics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics, and the foundations of artificial intelligence. He holds a PhD from Stanford University and an MA from the University of Munich, both in philosophy.
