Is AI art truly art and one California gallery believes it is | ARTOCOTE

Is AI art truly art and one California gallery believes it is | ARTOCOTE

As artificial intelligence becomes more popular for picture generation, a debate has arisen in the art world: Can AI make art?

Yes, according to bitforms gallery in San Francisco. The show “Artificial Imagination” will be on display until late December and will feature works developed with or inspired by the generative AI system DALL-E, as well as other types of AI. A user can type phrases into DALL-E and other comparable systems like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney to obtain an image back.

Steven Sacks, who created the original bitforms gallery in New York in 2001 (the San Francisco location will open in 2020), has always worked with artists who work at the interface of art and technology.

However, according to CNN Business, this may be the first art show to focus on DALL-E, which was built by OpenAI, and it is the only one Sacks has presented that focuses so directly on work generated with AI.

In the arts, the use of technology such as 3D printing and Photoshop is prevalent. However, innovative text-to-image algorithms such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney can generate stunning visuals at breakneck speed, unlike anything seen in the art world before.

Millions of individuals have flocked to these AI systems in just a few months, and they are already being used to make experimental films, magazine covers, and visuals to accompany news articles.

While these technologies are gaining traction, they are also causing debate. For example, when a Midjourney-generated artwork recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, it sparked outrage among artists.

For Sacks, generative AI systems like DALL-E are “simply another tool,” noting that artists have used previous work to produce new work in a variety of ways throughout history. “It’s a fantastic creative collaborator,” he remarked.

“Artificial Imagination” features artists who are well-known for using technology in their work, such as Refik Anadol, as well as those who are new to it. It spans from Anadol’s 30-minute video loop showing a computer’s interpretation of an ever-changing natural landscape to Marina Zurkow’s vivid image collages developed with DALL-E, which almost feel like Soviet propaganda mixed with old-fashioned storybooks.

According to Sacks, the exhibit, which is co-presented by bitforms and venture capital firm Day One Ventures, is an educational display about the state of DALL-E and how artists are utilising AI.

AI is used to enlarge the image by adding extra parts to it. Kamp also utilised Photoshop to make changes to the overall image.

Kamp said that the conventional perception of art galleries is that good art is scarce, but she sees generative AI tools like DALL-E as a method to persuade people that art can be plentiful (such as by making it so anyone can wake up from a vivid dream, type in a description of what they were imagining, and generate an image expressing their thoughts).

“Art is and should be very abundant to me because I see it as an expression of love and feelings, which I believe are abundant,” she remarked.

Some of the works on show use AI in a more indirect (and possibly ridiculous) way, such as Alexander Reben’s 2020 sculpture “Cesi N’est Pas Une Barriere.” Reben employed AI as a kind of art director, using text generator GPT-3 and a special set of algorithms to construct a description of a non-existent artwork that appears on the wall of bitforms gallery.

It includes the title, the name of a fictitious artist — Norifen Storgenberg, who is stated as “Swedish, born 1973” — and language such as “It has a really domestic feel, and yet it is quite oppressive.” They are used to restrain convicts in society, but here they are used to establish a barrier between the audience and the work.”

Reben fashioned his artwork, which also hangs on the wall, around the description, using materials such as green roof tiles, a porch light, metal grab bars, and handcuffs.

“I simply wanted to put it out there: Here are a variety of artists, here are a variety of ways of presenting this kind of work, living with this kind of work, engaging with this kind of work,” Sacks said. “I wanted people to inquire about it.”