EXTERNALIZATION AND IMAGINATION IN THE ERA OF GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. GENERATIVE AI AND THE BIRTH OF ARTIFICIAL IMAGINATION

Generative AIs are one of the latest, most amazing and exciting developments in AI technology. Indeed, these AIs have the ability to autonomously create original contents such as images, texts, sounds and videos: starting from a prompt - a description provided by the user these machines are able to 'generate' audiovisual contents in an almost completely indistinguishable from a human operator. Perhaps the time has come for philosophy to question about these tools and the effect they are able to have on their human users - a potentially disruptive effect, to the point of pushing the Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui to speak of "artificial imagination" in relation to the creative capacity of these machines. Facing Kant's thought about Imagination and its role in the process of understanding, we will try to explore the boundaries and characteristics of these machines, in order to be able to understand both their potential and the risks for human imagination.