Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article critiques the widespread assumption that generative AI systems exhibit genuine artistic creativity. While such systems can produce novel and aesthetically appealing outputs, assessments based solely on results obscure fundamental differences between human and artificial agents. Drawing on Hans Jonas’ concept of fragility —the vulnerable, world‐oriented condition of living beings—the essay argues that human creativity arises from a meaningful engagement with reality. Unlike AI, which processes data without awareness or intentionality, the human artist is shaped by receptivity, embodied experience, and the impulse to respond to the world. Artistic creation is thus not reducible to novelty or unpredictability but is grounded in the meaningful encounter between human subjectivity and the world. Creativity, in this light, is revealed as an act of responsive transformation—original, but not accidental; intentional, but not programmatic. The essay concludes that artistic creation requires a form of life capable of caring about and engaging with the world, and that this condition—fragility—is inherently absent in artificial systems.
Source: Modern Theology
DOI: 10.1111/moth.70048
Author: Johanna Merz
Institution: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Language: English
Topic: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W4415735656