Machines That Create: Contingent Computation and Generative AI

In this article, M. Beatrice Fazi takes up Media Theory’s invitation to engage with Alan Díaz Alva’s analysis of her philosophical work on contingency in computation. The central argument of Fazi’s Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics is that computation can be productive of ontological novelty. This piece revisits that argument in the light of the technological developments that have occurred since 2018, when the book was published. Focusing on generative artificial intelligence (generative AI), the article considers how the concepts of generativity, aesthetics and contingency are tackled in the book and in present-day debates about generative AI systems.