Pictures at an Exhibition—AI-Driven Surrealist Futures: The Case of Reimagining Higher Education through Aesthetic Critique

Abstract

This chapter explores the problematic of critique in the era of human-AI interaction. Drawing on Benjamin’s conception of dialectics at a standstill, the research makes use of an AI image generative application to construct an ‘exhibition’ of six imaginations—previously published as part of an imminent critique of entrepreneurial capitalistic economics. The research aim is to explore the potential of AI as a critical tool to unlock, access, or make visible, the value of human imagination. It addresses the question: can we (collectively) cultivate the use of genAI as a tool for a more general aesthetic engagement with a critical understanding of our future potential as a society? The chapter adopts a methodology of Applied Negative Dialectics, drawing implications from a single-case method, using AI-generated images of the future of Business Schools in Higher Education. The conclusion drawn is that the use of AI to garner the intrinsic value of ‘an empirics of the imagination’, in relation to the immanent critique of a defined area of socio-economic activity, provides the excitement of an AI that has value in facilitating the curation, exploration and enhancement of—rather than merely the replication and imitation of—the human experience. The chapter may benefit critical scholars, social and cultural theorists, artists and AI researchers by offering a new approach to utilising AI and aesthetically-informed judgment in socio-economic knowledge production