On the Injunction of XAIxArt
This is an incremental philosophical critique for researchers in AI ethics and art theory.
The paper critiques the application of explainable AI (XAI) in art, arguing that it reflects insecurities about anthropocentric art and outdated authorship concepts, without presenting empirical results or concrete numbers.
The position paper highlights the range of concerns that are engulfed in the injunction of explainable artificial intelligence in art (XAIxArt). Through a series of quick sub-questions, it points towards the ambiguities concerning 'explanation' and the postpositivist tradition of 'relevant explanation'. Rejecting both 'explanation' and 'relevant explanation', the paper takes a stance that XAIxArt is a symptom of insecurity of the anthropocentric notion of art and a nostalgic desire to return to outmoded notions of authorship and human agency. To justify this stance, the paper makes a distinction between an ornamentation model of explanation to a model of explanation as sense-making.