The letters AI usually stand for artificial intelligence. On this platform they also stand for aesthetic intelligence. The two are not rivals, and neither replaces the other. They do different jobs.
This way of putting it comes from Dr. Yi-Chen Guo, whose research on beauty in everyday life began in public in 2005 and who now teaches it as a graduate course at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
Two kinds of AI
Artificial intelligence expands what is possible. It can search, calculate, sort, predict and generate. More and more of the making, from images and music to text and product designs, can be done quickly and cheaply with its help.
Aesthetic intelligence sets the direction. It is the ability to notice what has value, judge which way to go, give an idea the right form, and take responsibility for what that form does in people's lives.
When making becomes cheap, those questions become harder, not easier. Why make this? What exactly? How much is enough? Dr. Guo's short version: artificial intelligence expands possibility; aesthetic intelligence decides direction.
From strength, to intellect, to aesthetic intelligence
Dr. Guo describes a shift in what each age values most.
- In the agricultural age, physical strength was the key to survival.
- In the industrial age, intellect was a vital source of value.
- In the age of AI, aesthetic intelligence is humanity's ultimate competitive advantage.
This does not mean strength and intellect stop mattering. Real creative work still needs hands on materials and a mind that can handle facts. What changes is what is scarce. When machines can help with the making and the analysis, the human contribution moves towards direction, judgement and care.
Six steps you can practise
Aesthetic intelligence is not a talent you either have or lack. In Dr. Guo's teaching it breaks down into six steps, and each one can be trained.
- Discover: recognise value in something ordinary.
- Feel: let materials and physical experience inform you.
- Understand: go back to where something comes from, its context and the people it belongs to.
- Judge: make a choice you can give reasons for, including the choice to say no.
- Create: turn that judgement into a new form.
- Realise: bring the work into real life, and take responsibility for what it does there.
Notice that only one of the six, Create, is the making itself. AI can help a great deal with that step. The other five are where your own perspective counts.
What this means for the exhibition
The Age of Aesthetic Intelligence: Who Am I? asks creators aged 13-18 to make interactive art about identity and the relationship between people and technology. Whatever tools you choose, what matters most is the choices behind the work: what you noticed, why it matters to you, and what you want someone else to experience.
Read the history of the idea in Twenty years of one question, or its older roots in Older than AI.
Sources
Cultural Creativity: Aesthetic Intelligence and IP in the AI Era, course outline