“It is not the eye, but the mind, which the painter of genius desires to address.”
— Sir Joshua Reynolds

I work every day with AI image tools, but I don’t believe for a second that AI has ever “seen” a beautiful image. It can generate images that look like beauty to us. It can remix every pattern humans have ever praised. It can even use the word “beautiful” in the right place.

But beauty itself? That’s ours.

My working hypothesis, sharpened in these conversations and in my own practice, is simple: only persons can encounter beauty. Only humans can see art as art. The machine can move symbols around beauty, but it can’t stand in front of it and be struck dumb.

That’s why my AI work lives or dies on one move: I throw away almost everything. I only keep the images that hit that mysterious threshold where I find myself thinking, “This one is beautiful.” Not “on trend,” not “high engagement,” not “good enough to post,” but beautiful in the older, heavier sense.

People are responding to these images not because AI suddenly learned taste, but because a human being is standing between the model and the public, acting as judge and priest, deciding which images are worthy to be seen. The machine is an insane apprentice. The discernment of beauty is fully in human hands.

And I’m not alone in thinking this way. There’s a long tradition behind this intuition that beauty belongs to persons, not to tools.

Thomas Aquinas is the first anchor. He gives the classic line: beauty is “that which, when seen, pleases” — pulchrum est id quod visum placet (Summa Theologiae I–II, q.27, a.1). But “seen” for Aquinas is more than the eyeball. It’s the senses under the judgment of the intellect. Beauty, for him, shows up where there is integrity (wholeness), proportion (harmony), and claritas (radiance, intelligible splendor).

Those aren’t just measurements. They are recognized and rejoiced in by a rational soul. The pleasure of beauty is the mind delighting in a form that makes sense and shines with meaning.

In Aquinas’ world, if there is no rational soul, there is no genuine aesthetic joy. A camera doesn’t “see” beauty; it just records light. An AI doesn’t “see” beauty; it just captures patterns. The seeing, the delight, the recognition — all of that happens in you.
(References: Summa Theologiae I, q.5; I–II, q.27; Commentary on the Divine Names.)

Kant takes a different road and ends up in the same neighborhood. In the Critique of Judgment (1790), he says a judgment of beauty involves a specific kind of pleasure that arises from the “free play” between imagination and understanding. When I say, “This is beautiful,” I’m not just reporting a preference like “I like coffee.” I’m speaking as if my judgment has a kind of universal weight.

For Kant, that kind of judgment is an experience had by a subject — an inner, reflective act. Someone is home, feeling a disinterested pleasure, turning it over, tasting it.

So if there’s no subject of experience — no “I” that feels, no interior theater where imagination and understanding dance — there is no real aesthetic judgment. You can have pattern classification. You can’t have, “This moves me.”
(Reference: Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, §§1–22.)

Hans Urs von Balthasar, the 20th-century Catholic master of aesthetics, pushes this even further. In The Glory of the Lord (especially vol. 1), he describes beauty as the radiant form of truth and goodness — the splendor of being that seizes the beholder. Beauty is not just a configuration lying out there in the world; it is a self-showing that demands response: wonder, reverence, sometimes fear.

For Balthasar, beauty is an encounter. Form on one side, a subject capable of being addressed on the other. It’s relational all the way down.

An AI has no “inner room” where that encounter happens. No fear, no awe, no joy, no sense of being summoned by something greater. It can model the language of those responses because human beings have filled the internet with descriptions of them. But it cannot be the one who is seized.
(Reference: Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1: Seeing the Form.)

C.S. Lewis, as usual, says the same thing in a way that hits the heart. In “The Weight of Glory” (1941), he describes earthly beauty as a kind of exile’s signal — it pierces us with longing that is ultimately for God. We don’t just want to look at beauty; we want to enter into it, to become part of it. That ache is one of the deepest marks of the human soul.

If beauty involves that longing — that homesickness for a homeland we haven’t seen — then creatures with no longing, no inwardness, no desire for beatitude cannot experience beauty as beauty. They can only skim the surface.
(Reference: C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory.”)

From another angle entirely, John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument gives us a hard-edged tool to separate what AI can simulate from what it can actually have. In “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (1980), Searle imagines a person in a room following a rulebook to respond to Chinese characters. From outside, it looks like the room “understands Chinese.” Inside, the person is just shuffling symbols without any grasp of meaning.

His point: a system can manipulate syntax without any semantics. It can behave as if it understands without understanding anything at all.

Apply that to beauty and AI and the picture sharpens: a model can output “this is beautiful” at exactly the right moment. It can statistically predict what images humans will tend to call beautiful. It can even “curate” in a way that looks like taste. But there is no understanding or liking there — no semantic content, no felt value, no one saying, “I love this one.”

From that angle, my line holds: AI can simulate talk about beauty, and simulate actions that presuppose a taste for beauty, but there is no “someone home” who finds one thing beautiful and another ugly.
(Reference: John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980).)

Josef Pieper, the German Catholic philosopher, connects all this to contemplation. In Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation (1952), he argues that both true art and true contemplation depend on a receptive posture toward reality — a willingness to be still, to let things show themselves, to receive rather than grasp. Beauty is not something we manufacture; it is something we receive.

That receptivity is personal and contemplative. It belongs to someone with interior life, with leisure of soul. Without that interiority, you don’t get contemplation; you only get processing.

So again, the AI can mimic the outputs of someone who has contemplative taste, but it cannot have what Pieper calls the “loving gaze” that underlies both real art and the perception of beauty.
(Reference: Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation.)

Roger Scruton, in his book Beauty (2009), makes the point in explicitly modern terms. For Scruton, beauty is inseparable from the world as it appears to a subject — and often, especially, from the human face, the realm of love, reverence, and presence. He is deeply suspicious of any attempt to reduce beauty to pattern, instinct, or biological hack.

For him, aesthetics is about “looks that look back,” about a world encountered as thou, not just it. So a non-person can be part of someone else’s aesthetic life (as an object or a tool), but it cannot have an aesthetic life of its own.
(Reference: Roger Scruton, Beauty.)

And then there’s John Paul II’s Letter to Artists (1999), which puts the vocation of the artist right inside Christian theology. He says the artist shares in God’s own creative work, with a special role in “perceiving” and “bringing to light” the splendor present in creation and in man. That calling is tied explicitly to being a person made in the image of God.

By implication, tools — whether brushes or cameras or neural networks — can be instruments in that work, but they cannot receive the call. They cannot suffer beauty, wrestle with it, or respond to it in freedom. Only persons can.
(Reference: John Paul II, Letter to Artists.)

So when I sit here as an “AI art director,” ruthlessly culling the images the model throws at me and keeping only the beautiful ones, I’m not competing with the machine on its own turf. I’m doing something the machine simply cannot do.

Put simply:

Art and beauty are fully in our domain because they are rooted in personhood — in minds and hearts that can delight, judge, long, and respond. AI can help me explore possibilities. It can be my wild apprentice. But it cannot see beauty.

That part is mine.

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