Why Disdain AI Art? Signaling Theory, Metaphysics, and Artificial Intelligence

This paper examines why AI-generated art often provokes resistance, suspicion, or outright disdain despite its increasing technical sophistication. It argues that this reaction cannot be adequately explained by appeal to perceptual or intrinsic features alone. Instead, the paper integrates two complementary theoretical frameworks—signaling theory and a thick metaphysics of art—to explain what is at stake in contemporary responses to artificial creativity. From an evolutionary perspective, artistic production and appreciation function in part as costly signals of underlying human traits such as intelligence, creativity, coordination, and endurance. These signals are socially valuable precisely because they are costly to produce based on artistic qualities that are hard to fake. AI systems disrupt this signaling equilibrium by dramatically reducing the cost of producing artifacts with impressive intrinsic properties, thereby severing the traditional link between artistic output and the abilities of a human agent. At the same time, the paper draws on thickness theory to argue that artworks are partly constituted by extrinsic properties such as causal history, authorship, intention, and cultural context. On this view, originals matter not merely because of audience psychology or social signaling, but because these extrinsic features are metaphysically relevant to what artworks are. AI-generated works complicate this framework by obscuring authorship and introducing causal histories that lack unified agency or intentional structure. The paper argues that these two accounts—often treated as rivals—are best understood as mutually reinforcing. Signaling theory explains why audiences care so deeply about extrinsic features, while thickness theory explains why those features matter independently of signaling. Together, they illuminate why AI art challenges entrenched norms of artistic value and authorship, and why human artistic agency remains distinctive even as artificial systems increasingly participate in creative domains.