Special and General Computational Aesthetics

Ganqing Luo, Chuan Li, Liaoruxing Zhang, Xin Jin

Computational aesthetics is a field at the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence, aesthetics, and other disciplines. As AI has developed, the field has formed relations of inclusion, intersection, or support with computational art, AI art, AI aesthetics, AI-generated content (AIGC), computational creativity, affective computing, and neuroaesthetics. Without distinguishing scope, objectives, and methods, it may be narrowed to image aesthetic quality assessment or expanded into an umbrella term for AI's involvement in art. We analyze its internal structure and its relations with neighboring concepts, and propose a two-level scope: special computational aesthetics (SCA) and general computational aesthetics (GCA). SCA centers on aesthetic measurement and aesthetic process modeling. The former primarily corresponds to "Aesthetic Perception": computationally identifying and representing aesthetic attributes and predicting human aesthetic evaluations; the latter primarily to "Aesthetic Understanding": computationally describing, testing, and explaining how human aesthetic perception and judgment are formed. GCA extends this core to include "Aesthetic Generation,"…