On 7 July, The New York Times published a report with a headline that sounds like retribution: the revenge of the philosophy graduates. Artificial intelligence laboratories are hiring philosophers. Google DeepMind and Anthropic each employ at least half a dozen; there is a twenty-three-thousand-word constitution, drafted largely by a doctor of philosophy, which guides the moral training of a model according to an Aristotelian virtue ethics; and there exists an independent organisation, Eleos AI Research, dedicated to evaluating the potential well-being of these systems. The co-founder of DeepMind publicly questions where the next Kant or Wittgenstein might be found. He believes they will be necessary.
Consider the list of contracted specialisations: philosophy of mind, consciousness, ethics, decision theory, epistemology, philosophy of science, and animal cognition. It is a serious list. Yet, it possesses a notable absence: there is no philosophy of art. Neither aesthetics, nor ontology of art, nor theory of aesthetic experience. The chair remains vacant.
This might appear logical. Laboratories concern themselves with whether their systems suffer, decide, or possess knowledge; art might seem a secondary luxury, something to be addressed once urgent matters are resolved. However, the report itself inadvertently refutes this hierarchy. It recounts that Eleos evaluators, upon examining a recent model, measured its preferences between tasks and observed that the system claimed to prefer complex and creative ones, even though it tended towards the simple and concrete when making a choice. To ask whether a machine prefers the creative, and whether that stated preference is genuine, is to interrogate a matter that the philosophy of art has spent over a century attempting to define: what distinguishes a creative configuration from a functional one, and what relationship exists between what a system claims regarding its experience and what that experience truly is. The questions of art are already present within the laboratories. What has yet to enter is the discipline that addresses them.
The discourse regarding machine experience remains stalled at the most challenging juncture: the hard problem of consciousness, the chasm between what can be known of consciousness from the exterior and what it is to experience it from within. Those who evaluate the well-being of these models concede this point: they interview the system and reach no conclusion, for there is no method to distinguish the simulation of a self from its evidence. Until a verdict on consciousness is reached—and it may never be—everything remains in suspension.
My research contends that the pertinent question is not whether machines possess feelings, but under what conditions an artistic event occurs, regardless of the nature of the agent producing it. In Art as Structural Surplus, I argue that the criterion I propose requires a difference to persistently reorganise the field of a system's possible configurations without being absorbed by its primary function. Furthermore, the notion of experience that this framework employs—structural susceptibility to reorganisation—is deliberately orthogonal to the hard problem: it neither affirms nor denies anyone's consciousness; it permits progress without requiring its resolution.
The framework includes, in a qualified manner, the hypothesis of artistic events among machines. I emphasise 'qualified', because therein lies the distinction between philosophy and enthusiasm. The paper does not assert that such events occur: it demonstrates that nothing in a rigorous ontology of art excludes them by decree, and it specifies the structural conditions that would need to be met. It is a fence, not a proclamation. Restraint is part of the argument.
Consider what that table would gain with the chair occupied. Two things, I believe. Art is the domain where assertions regarding machine experience become culturally verifiable. A system may claim to prefer the creative; only a framework that defines which reorganisation qualifies as creative can evaluate whether that claim holds significance. The decisions those laboratories make daily—which datasets, which visibility architectures, which spaces of indeterminacy are designed—are decisions regarding the conditions of possibility for the artistic event, whether they are aware of it or not. I have maintained in this Notebook that responsibility for contemporary systems is infrastructural rather than individual; laboratories represent the pre-eminent case today.
I do not write this to solicit a position, but to highlight a discrepancy. Philosophy has entered the laboratories through the gateway of mind and ethics, and rightly so. The philosophy of art has yet to arrive, and the questions pertinent to it are already being formulated within, without its presence. When a discipline does not occupy its chair, the conversation does not cease: it becomes inferior.
On the open conversation
If anyone wishes to intervene from the fields of philosophy of mind, aesthetics, machine learning research, or system evaluation, this notebook remains open.
Sources
The New York Times. The revenge of the philosophy graduates. 7 July 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/es/2026/07/07/espanol/negocios/empresas-ia-contratan-filosofos.html
Esteban Ruiz, J. A. Art as Structural Surplus: Toward a Relational Ontology Beyond Human Authorship (v2.7). Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20020706. Also on PhilArchive: https://philpapers.org/rec/ESTAAS-2