These are just some speculative possibilities focused on different reactions to AI - subversive misuse, romanticized rebellion, hyper-individualism, and appropriation of technical methods:
- Automated art - Artists fully relinquish creative agency to AI systems that are capable of generating novel works based on algorithms and machine learning. This takes postmodern questioning of authorship to its logical conclusion.
- Algorithmic absurdity - Artists use AI in unintended ways to deliberately generate meaningless/nonsensical outputs that challenge our faith in computation and fixed meaning.
- Neo-spiritualism - Artists explore syncretic mash-ups of computer code, esoteric philosophies and mystical symbolism as a reaction to the "disenchanted" world of scientific rationality.
- Hyper-subjectivity - A radically person-centered art emerges celebrating individual perspective and lived experience as an antidote to dehumanizing algorithms.
- Data-driven formalism - Artists appropriate data analytics and visualization techniques but in a highly structured style echoing modernist abstraction. Precision instead of ambiguity.
- Computational conceptualism - The idea itself behind the art takes full precedence while the material form is incidental and fully outsourced to AI systems.
Current State:
Postmodernism emphasizes fragmentation, ambiguity, deconstruction - things that are at odds with the computational nature of AI systems. So there's definitely a philosophical tension between art and a process of design. At the same time, postmodern art often does appropriate cultural artifacts and genres, remixing them in irreverent ways. AI could be seen as just another tool for remixing and reconstructing meaning. So in that sense, it aligns with postmodern tactics, if not overall worldview. AI poses a challenge to postmodernism if it can actually make coherent sense out of postmodern art's irreducible ambiguity. This computational reductionism is probably the cognitive-dissonace post-modernists would experience. The relationship between postmodernism and AI may remain antagonistic. But both sides might evolve by challenging each other - postmodernists being forced to double down on creativity to stay ahead of AI, and AI systems having to become more nuanced to interpret postmodern expressions. Or the concept collapses into an old framework as we move on to a new paradigm of mutually aligned creative expression.