Is AI art really art? This question has been the subject of much public discussion and is one that philosophical aesthetics should be well-placed to address. Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus within the discipline on how to tackle key definitional questions such as this. In the case of AI, we can add to this the unique challenge of works not made by humans. In this chapter, I argue for the utility of a Wittgensteinian approach to the question of whether AI art is art. This approach typically repudiates the need to provide necessary and sufficient conditions. Using Gaut's cluster account, I show that AI art can indeed count as art. I also demonstrate that the cluster account of art is particularly useful for thinking about art made by AI.

The Cluster Account of Art

The perceived failures of contemporary definitions of art (particularly a failure to garner any broad consensus amongst philosophers) led Berys Gaut to take a Wittgensteinian approach to art. Gaut was not the first to consider Wittgenstein's work in relation to the definition of art. Gaut's theory re-visits the work of philosophers in the 1950s who applied Wittgenstein's family resemblance approach to the question ‘what is art?’, arguing for an anti-definitionalist approach (see Weitz 1956; Ziff 1953; Kennick 1958). These philosophers argue for two key points: first, that art cannot be defined (in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions), and second, that art is a concept best characterized in terms of family resemblance (Gaut 2000). Instead of resemblance-to-paradigm as the model for the concept of art, however, Gaut turns to a ‘cluster account’ construal of family resemblance (Gaut 2000, 26). The cluster version of family resemblance that Gaut adopts comes from Wittgenstein's discussion of proper names (Wittgenstein 2009: PI §79) and was further developed by Searle (1958). As Gaut writes,