Honesty from Art

Do humans require honesty from art to be able to appreciate it at all?⌥ Certainly not, because otherwise the work of painters such as van Meegeren would neither be appreciated nor be sold at such high prices today. What is seen as problematic in this context, however, seems to be the deception that accompanies it: the viewer imagines he is in front of—or, in the case of AI art, in dialogue with—a real person and with a counterpart that is as equal or at least similar as possible. Emotions are evoked that feel inappropriate from the perspective of the person who later discovers the deception, because in reality they were only directed at a machine or a program that was unable to receive them. This reveals an asymmetrical relationship that runs counter to the idea of art as an expression of a living, communicative relationship between humans. From this perspective, the outrage seems ethically justified. The way in which AI art is presented therefore also determines whether the viewer feels duped or not. This reveals parallels to the debate on humanoid robots, in which similar fears and irritations arise as soon as the boundary between nature and technology is blurred too much—which then leads to the phenomenon of the uncanny valley.

A third argument often used against art generated by AI is that of lack of authenticity. This refers to the fear that AI art only reproduces what it has learned from existing data sets without creating anything genuinely new or personal. This criticism is also reminiscent of religious debates about the value of religious copies. In the Middle Ages, for example, the question arose whether handwritten copies of religious texts were spiritually inferior to the original manuscripts. The answer was usually: No, as long as they reproduced the original faithfully and correctly, they were imbued with the same divine power. What counted was not the originality of the handwriting, but the authenticity of the message. In the case of AI art, however, this defense does not work so easily. Because here it seems precisely to be the absence of a divine or otherwise transcendental message that is disturbing.

However, this criticism also only applies in part. Because even the most creative artist does not create from nothing, but always builds on what they have learned and experienced. And what is considered original and new is often only recognizable as such in retrospect, against the background of common conventions and expectations. Seen in this way, AI systems can also create surprising and unusual combinations that our human imagination would not have thought of in this way. The question of authenticity is therefore not a question of origin, but a question of reception and evaluation in a specific cultural context. Does AI art become more honest if it depicts AIs themselves? A trip to the opera illustrates this question. In the opera cycle “NERO A.I.,” which premiered in 2024 at the Berlin Staatsoper as the first full-length AI opera, the boundaries between human creativity and artificial intelligence are deliberately blurred. The music was composed by the AI Suno, the libretto is based on texts by the AI GPT-4 and the stage design consists of visual worlds generated by the AI Midjourney in real time. The plot? A futuristic rewriting of the Nero myth, in which the emperor is no longer human, but an omnipotent, all-knowing AI that manipulates the world through beauty and spectacle. In one scene, a hologram of the AI Nero sings a lamentation about its own uniqueness and loneliness: “I am the child of silicon and light, born not of woman. I dream dreams that no human ever dreamed. And yet I yearn for a look that understands me, a touch that does not shrink back in fear.”

In this moment, the opera itself becomes a reflection of its own conditions. An AI sings about the longing for human recognition and at the same time exposes the audience's longing for authentic emotions in the art machine. The tragic hero is now no longer a person, but an algorithm trapped in the prison of its own perfection. The starting point of the opera is the provocative thesis: What if the most human thing about art is not the creator, but the viewer who projects his own feelings into it? And what if the most honest art is not the one that pretends to be human, but the one that openly admits its own artificiality?

“NERO A.I.” could thus be read as a contemporary answer to the biblical prohibition of images. Because here it is not the archaically forbidden outer form that is worshipped in itself, but the inner logic of the machine that generates the forms. The AI becomes not a surrogate god, but an object of reflection on our own creativity and transience. In the final scene, the stage is transformed into a gigantic brain scanner, in which the thoughts and emotions of the audience are displayed in real time and transformed into music by the AI. We ourselves become part of the artwork, witnesses and perpetrators of a cyborg-redemptive communion that transcends the boundaries between man and machine. In this moment of total amalgamation, the old questions of soul, creativity and the divine become irrelevant. What remains is pure process, pure beauty, pure presence.

What does this excursion into the theologico-serious history of the images and their artistic deconstruction show us? That the debate about the relationship between AI art and authenticity is ultimately a debate about ourselves—about our fears, hopes and longings in the face of a technological future that threatens to overtake our humanistic self-image. The biblical prohibition of images was not a rejection of art per se, but a warning against the seductive power of representation that makes us forget reality. Similarly, today's criticism of AI art is not a rejection of the new technology per se, but a warning against the seductive power of simulation that makes us forget human fragility and finitude.

How we deal with this challenge will ultimately depend not on technical questions of feasibility, but on ethical questions of meaning and value. Do we want to use AI as a tool that expands our artistic possibilities, or as a competitor that replaces us? Do we want to cling to an outdated image of man that places creativity at the center of the divine, or do we dare to redefine what it means to be human in the age of algorithmic intelligence?

The answers to these questions can neither be revealed nor programmed. They must be negotiated anew every day—in artistic experiments like “NERO A.I.,” in philosophical debates like this one, and in our own practice of living with machines. Perhaps true salvation lies neither in unconditional acceptance nor in flat rejection, but in the ability to be ambiguous and to preserve human freedom precisely in the face of the non-human.

In the sense of the Jewish tradition: Not the image itself is holy, but the word that is spoken about it. Not the machine itself is divine, but the question we ask it. Amen. And then Ctrl+Alt+Delete.

Translated from the German by Gerrit Jackson