FROM TIKTOK TO THE TRIBUNAL OF REASON: A SINA DE OFÉLIA, AI VOICE CLONING, AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE KANTIAN BEAUTIFUL

Abstract

This article analyzes the viral phenomenon of the musical track A Sina de Ofélia, produced by artificial intelligence (AI) in December 2025, in light of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics as developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Based on a bibliographic review and a case study, it investigates the extent to which a work generated by algorithms challenges the Kantian concepts of judgment of taste, the beautiful, genius, and the sublime. The text also engages with Luciano Floridi’s conception of artificial agency, distinguishing artificial intelligence’s capacity to produce aesthetic effects from the absence of consciousness, intentionality, and genuine creation. It concludes that, although artificial intelligence systems are capable of reproducing formal patterns, eliciting aesthetic pleasure, and influencing collective taste, they remain incapable of engaging in the free play of the faculties that grounds the Kantian beautiful. In this sense, A Sina de Ofélia reveals less the triumph of machine creativity than the emergence of a technological sublime, in which astonishment before the power of algorithms reaffirms the centrality of the human faculty of judgment.