AI Art and Artists: A Conversation with Dr. Dominic McIver Lopes

In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Dominic McIver Lopes, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. In a dozen books and around eighty articles, he has offered new conceptions of aesthetic value, art, and the relationship between art and technology, especially new information technologies. He advocates for pluralism about artistic and aesthetic value and is currently writing a book about value pluralism in the global history of philosophy. Our conversation centres on one recent article: “AI Art and Artists: What They Are, What They Could Be, What They Should Be,” published on March 8, 2026 in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. We discuss what AI art is, whether an AI system could ever qualify as an artist, and what questions about agency, creativity and value reveal about the distinction between making art and being an artist. The conversation also considers what AI could become, what kinds of artistic…