Im Rahmen der Ringvorlesung „Ideengeschichtliche Pfade“ hält Prof. Dr. Susanna Lindberg von der University of Leiden am 2. Juni 2025, 18.15 Uhr, einen Vortrag zum Thema „AI: Artificial Imagination“.

This talk reflects on the philosophical presuppositions of artworks made with the help of AI. Such works illustrate my more general claim that in order to understand works-of-AI, we should not look at them as works of intelligence (aiming at logos) but at most as works of imagination (playing with mimesis). But can it even be said that AI imagines? To clarify this issue, the talk follows the idea of imagination as formulated by Kant and then developed by Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy. In this line of thought, it becomes possible to think that imagination is not only a free gift of nature, but always already a technics. For these philosophers, it is a particular technics whose law is mimesis, that is, capacity of producing and sharing semblances, fictions and figures. Is this also what a generative AI does? The talk distinguishes more and less imaginative uses of AI in art and suggests, in the end, that even if it cannot be said that a generative AI imagines, still, in best cases, imagination can take place in well-constituted assemblies between humans and AIs.

Susanna Lindberg is professor of continental philosophy at the University of Leiden, Netherlands, and academic director of the Institute for Philosophy of the University of Leiden. She is specialist of German idealism, phenomenology, and contemporary French philosophy. In recent years, her research has carried on the question of technology, and she has also worked on the philosophical question of art. In her new research she focuses on ecological questions. Her publications include From Technological Humanity to Bio-Technical Existence (SUNY, 2023) and Techniques en philosophie (Hermann, 2020).