Abstract

The recent development of AI art systems like DeepAI (2024), DALL-E (2024), and Stable Diffusion (2023) has brought increased attention to the nature of artistic creativity. While much discussion has focused on whether AI systems can be truly creative or whether their outputs qualify as art (see for example Hertzmann, 2018), this paper takes a different approach. Drawing on philosophical frameworks for understanding different types of imagination, I argue that analyzing AI art systems through established taxonomies of imagination reveals fundamental truths about both the nature of machine creativity and human imaginative faculties.