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How AI Experiences Art: Emergent Aesthetic Structure in a Self-Supervised Multimodal Embedding Space

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 27, 2026 · UTC

Aesthetics are an important part of the symbolism of artistic works. Although subjective, humans categorize art based on the emotion evoked regardless of modality. What remains under-explored is how AI models form their own aesthetic categorization of human-produced media without explicit labels or cross-modal supervision. We present a self-supervised framework that projects four modalities (text, audio, image and video) into a shared 256-dimensional embedding space and applies iterative clustering to discover aesthetic structure. We discuss the divergence between AI-generated cluster assignme

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First collected: 2026-09-21T08:32:02.028Z. This is not the publication date.