Bengaluru, Nov. 5 -- In 1935, the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin posed a question about art in an age of rapidly advancing technology. In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he argued that even the most perfect reproduction of an artwork lacked something fundamental: its unique presence in time and space, the history it had accumulated and the authenticity that set it apart from a copy.

Benjamin called this quality the artwork's "aura". That aura began to wither, he argued, as photography and film made it possible to reproduce and circulate images on an unprecedented scale.

Nearly a century later, generative artificial intelligence has brought the argument into sharper focus. Technolo...