Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía por la Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU)
Investigador
en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte. / PhD in
Philosophy – University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origins of art.
A review of the study by Mikalonytė and Kneer (2022): Can Artificial Intelligence Make Art?
Introduction: Can a machine be an artist?
In recent years, artificial intelligence systems have amazed the world with their capacity to generate images, music, and texts that, in many cases, are indistinguishable from human creations. Algorithms such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion produce visual works of a quality that would have seemed impossible a decade ago. Robots like Ai-Da exhibit in contemporary art galleries. And the public, in general, contemplates these phenomena with a mixture of fascination and perplexity.
But one fundamental question persists, and it is not purely technical: can what a machine generates be considered art? Can a robot be called an artist?
These questions, which seem taken from a Philip K. Dick novel, have entered fully into the domain of empirical research. A study published in 2022 by Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė and Markus Kneer, in the journal ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interactions, addresses precisely this question using tools from experimental psychology and experimental philosophy (or "x-phi") .
The results, as we shall see, are surprising and revealing: people are willing to accept that paintings generated by robots can be art, but they are very reluctant to grant those same robots the status of artists. This dissociation, we will argue, is not mere prejudice, but a deep clue about what we understand by creativity, intentionality, and, ultimately, the very origin of art.
The study: what do we really think about paintings made by robots?
Mikalonytė and Kneer designed two experiments with a total of 693 participants to explore public perception of AI-generated art . They manipulated three fundamental factors:
Agent type: an AI-driven robot versus a human agent.
Behavior type: intentional creation of a painting versus accidental creation.
Object type: abstract painting versus representational (figurative) painting.
Participants had to evaluate, on the one hand, whether the produced painting was considered art and, on the other, whether the agent (robot or human) deserved to be considered an artist.
The results were clear and consistent. First, people judged robot-made paintings and human-made paintings to be art to roughly the same extent. That is, the public does not automatically reject a work simply because it was generated by a machine. If the visual result is similar, the label "art" is applied generously.
However —and this is the central finding— people are much less willing to consider robots as artists. Although they accept that the work can be art, they resist attributing to the robot the status of artist. This dissociation is not trivial: it reveals that, for the public, being an artist implies something more than producing aesthetically valuable objects.
Why can't a robot be an artist? The question of intentionality
The study by Mikalonytė and Kneer offers a crucial clue to explain this resistance: people are less willing to attribute artistic intentions to robots . In other words, although a robot can generate an image that we consider beautiful or interesting, we do not believe that behind that image there is a purpose, a will to express, a desire to communicate something.
This is a fundamental difference. The philosophical tradition of art, at least since Romanticism, has placed emphasis on the intentionality of the creator. The artist is not merely a craftsman who produces objects, but a subject who expresses their interiority, who communicates their emotions, who seeks to provoke a response in the viewer.
When we contemplate a human painting, even an abstract one, we tend to ask: what did the artist mean? What were they feeling? What were they trying to communicate? These questions presuppose a mind, a subjectivity, a personal history. In the case of a robot, however sophisticated its algorithm, there is no one "inside" who can want, feel, or communicate in that full sense.
The experiment confirms this intuition: the attribution of artistic intentionality is a key predictor of the willingness to grant artist status. And that attribution simply does not occur in the case of robots, at least not to the same extent as in the case of humans.
Artifact versus author: the paradox of AI-generated art
The study by Mikalonytė and Kneer highlights an interesting paradox. On the one hand, contemporary culture has enormously expanded the concept of art: Duchamp's readymade, conceptual art, installations, performance... All of this has shifted attention from the object to the idea, from the product to the process. One might think that, in this context, attributing artistic status to an AI-generated work should not be problematic.
However, the public continues to establish a clear distinction between the work and its author. The work can be art, but the robot is not an artist. What does this mean? Perhaps that, deep down, we continue to conceive art as an act of communication between subjectivities. The work is the vehicle, the artist is the source. If there is no conscious, intentional, embodied source, then the work, however beautiful, becomes an orphaned artifact, a message without a sender.
This popular intuition, far from being mere technophobic prejudice, has deep philosophical roots. Authors such as Walter Benjamin spoke of the "aura" of the original artwork, linked to its unique presence in time and space. Others, such as Richard Wollheim, insisted that the understanding of art requires attributing to the artist a mental state —an intention, an emotion, a belief— that is expressed in the work. Without that attribution, the aesthetic experience is impoverished or transformed into something else.
Connection with research on the origin of art (S/Y/C)
This experimental study connects directly with the research we have been developing on the S/Y/C model of neuronal functioning and the Law of Biological Coherence.
The public's resistance to considering robots as artists stems fundamentally from the fact that people do not attribute artistic intentionality to them. And artistic intentionality, according to our model, is a manifestation of the Y (Symbolon) dimension, but also of S (Survival) and C (Wholeness).
S (Survival): Artistic intentionality is not an abstract luxury. It is rooted in the biological need to regulate our affective states. The artist creates because they feel, because they hurt, because they rejoice, because they need to process the world in order to survive in it. A robot does not have these needs because it has no body to preserve, no evolutionary history of fears and hopes, no personal biography of losses and loves.
Y (Symbolon): Artistic intention is, above all, a symbolic intention. The artist does not merely produce forms: they produce symbolon, acts of recognition through shared codes. They want the viewer to see something, feel something, recognise something. The robot can manipulate symbols efficiently, but it does not inhabit the symbol. There is no one "inside" trying to recognise or be recognised.
C (Wholeness): The artist seeks, through their work, to achieve a form of wholeness —to close a form, resolve a rhythm, integrate a dispersed experience into a coherent totality. This drive toward wholeness is a biological and existential need of the living organism. A robot does not experience it because it is not a being that unfolds in time toward an end, nor one that yearns to integrate itself into a whole greater than itself.
The study by Mikalonytė and Kneer empirically confirms what our Surgical Philosophy predicts: the public is not irrational in resisting calling a robot an "artist". They are simply detecting, perhaps implicitly, that full artistic creativity requires something that machines, for now, do not possess: a body that feels, an intention that expresses itself, a subjectivity that unfolds in time.
Implications for the future of art and AI
Does this mean that artificial intelligence has nothing to contribute to the world of art? Not at all. The study shows that the public is willing to consider AI-generated works as art. And that is an important recognition: algorithms can produce objects with genuine aesthetic value that challenge us, move us, make us think.
However, the reluctance to call robots "artists" is not an obstacle to be eliminated, but a distinction to be preserved. It reminds us that art is not just a matter of products, but of embodied processes. Art is the testimony that there is someone —a flesh-and-blood being, with a history, with a body that feels— who wanted to say something. That "someone" is irreplaceable.
Artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for human artists. It can amplify their creativity, offer them unexpected variations, free them from tedious tasks. But the place of the artist —as the source of intentionality, as an embodied subject, as a moral and affective agent— will foreseeably remain human. Because art, in its essence, is the encounter between two subjectivities: that of the creator and that of the viewer. And that encounter, for now, can only occur between beings who feel.
Final considerations: art as an encounter of subjectivities
The study by Mikalonytė and Kneer offers us a valuable lesson for research on the origin of art. Human art was not born as a mere production of beautiful objects. It was born as a form of affective communication, as a bridge between minds trapped in the solitude of their skulls. Art is, above all, an act of expression and a call for response.
That is why, although a machine can produce objects formally analogous to human ones, it cannot occupy the place of the artist. Because the artist is not only a producer of forms: they are a being who says something, who seeks to be heard, who shares their inner world. And that, perhaps, is the most human thing there is.
Artificial intelligence can imitate the product. But the process —the trembling of the hand, the doubt before the canvas, the joy of a successful stroke, the hope that someone, someday, will understand what you meant— remains, for now, the exclusive patrimony of the living.
References
López Mallo, J. B. (2023). La construcción neuro-simbólica. Una aproximación al funcionamiento del cerebro desde una perspectiva multidisciplinar [Doctoral thesis, University of the Basque Country - Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea]. ADDI Repository. http://hdl.handle.net/10810/62701
https://catalogo.sanchoelsabio.eus
López Mallo, J. B. (2026a). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo. Lopez Mallo, Javier Bernabé. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57196
López Mallo, J. B. (2026a). De la filosofía quirúrgica a la ley de coherencia biológica S/Y/C: Hacia una investigación sobre el origen del arte en la especie Homo [Kindle edition]. Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYGTJD5C
López Mallo, J. B. (2026b). From surgical philosophy to the law of biological coherence S/Y/C: Toward a study of the origin of art in the Homo lineage. Lopez Mallo, Javier Bernabé. https://isbn.bibna.gub.uy/catalogo.php?mode=detalle&nt=57197
López Mallo, J. B. (2026b). From surgical philosophy to the law of biological coherence S/Y/C: Toward a study of the origin of art in the Homo lineage [Kindle edition]. Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GY89SZS1
Mikalonytė, E. S., & Kneer, M. (2022). Can artificial intelligence make art? ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 11(4), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3510829
Autor / Author
Bernabé Mallo
Doctor en Filosofía – Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Investigador independiente en neurofilosofía, evolución humana y origen del arte.
Bernabé Mallo
PhD in Philosophy – University of the Basque Country / Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
Independent researcher in neurophilosophy, human evolution, and the origin of art.
Enlaces / Links
Página de autor Amazon / Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9002-9728
Plataforma EHUenRed / Link EHUenRed: https://www.ehu.eus/es/web/masterrak-eta-graduondokoak/red-latinoamericana-de-posgrados
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neuroideas815
Canal YouTube / Channel YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBsf6OZ482NjST6QA-hvYtQ
Publicaciones y proyectos en desarrollo / Publications and projects:
https://www.amazon.com/author/bernabemallo
https://ehuenred.theglocal.network/ideas/el-origen-del-arte-en-el-cerebro-de-makapansgat-al-moma-del-primate-al-sapiens
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