Muse and Algorithm. Do Neural Networks Create Real Art?

Lev Naumov – writer, playwright, cultural scientist, director, PhD. He gives lectures on literature, cinema, and art studies. Author of prose books "Whisper of Forgotten Letters" (2014), "Hypothesis of Daedalus" (2018), "Dreamswimmer" (2021). Researcher of the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Kaidanovsky, Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol, Terry Gilliam, Christopher Nolan, Sergei Parajanov, David Lynch, and other cultural figures.

This book is not just a study, but an intellectual journey at the intersection of art studies, neuroscience, and digital aesthetics. Relying on philosophy, visual examples, and live speech, the author offers a thoughtful conversation about what creativity is. Can it be described and programmed? And if so, does this mean it can no longer be considered purely “human”? How do we now recognize art? Where are the boundaries between original and generated, authentic and simulated?

Can neural networks be artists or writers? Is what they create exclusively theirs, or rather, with them? Is art itself not secondary? Lev Naumov seeks answers to these and other questions that so far seem blurred, like the lines in Impressionist paintings. But the fact that generative models make us write books about them and with them is already a result of the synergy, which will inevitably lead to progress and deconstruction of former forms (Ksenia Burzhskaya, prose writer, poet, AI evangelist of the virtual assistant Alice in “Yandex”).