AI in art - New opportunity or insidious encroachment? - Newsreel
By Sara Oscar
A post on Reddit shows a photograph of a poster advertising the upcoming triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria. The image comes from Ayoung Kim’s multi-screen video installation, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024).
The image shows a Korean woman running through a crowded, futuristic city. She is wearing a delivery rider’s suit and gloves.
The image comes from a video about women who work as delivery drivers in a future version of Seoul where life is bleak. Artificial intelligence forces the women to compete against one another, watches their work and distorts their sense of time.
The artwork combines AI, computer-generated imagery (CGI), video game engines and live-action footage.
The Reddit comments criticise the use of generative AI. They do not distinguish between artists who use generative AI to make art and situations where AI replaces the artist completely. They question why the gallery has chosen to promote a work that uses AI as an artistic tool.
There is an irony here. The comments oppose a world where AI takes over people's jobs. But Kim’s work also explores this very problem.
The main issue seems to be her decision to use generative AI as a way to make art.
AI everywhere
AI systems shape our daily lives. They are used in warfare, control what appears in our social media feeds, analyse our facial expressions and take data we upload. A small number of technology companies collect and profit from this data, which has become a valuable resource stored in the cloud.
Our data is used to build the datasets behind commercial generative AI tools. These tools fill the internet with low-quality, AI-generated content, often called “AI slop”. And it seems we cannot escape it.
It is no surprise that Reddit users are upset to see art made with generative AI. If AI also replaces art and creativity, what parts of our social lives will remain untouched by its growing influence?
However, their concerns mix up two different things: AI replacing an artist and an artist choosing to use the technology.
Does an artist’s intention matter?
Media theorist Joanna Zylinska carefully separates two kinds of art made with generative AI.
She compares popular AI art to a mindless game of Candy Crush. This is when an artist uses generative AI only for what it can do, celebrating its ability to turn data into impressive-looking images.
Critical AI art, by contrast, is about whether an artwork helps people see the effects of the technology. This includes how AI systems are built, how they affect workers and even how they change our understanding of what it means to be human.
The role of the gallery
Art institutions around the world are paying more attention to how AI affects art and creativity.
Some of these artworks strongly criticise the way AI systems take and use data and other resources for their own benefit.
But art institutions depend on corporate sponsors, visitor numbers and media attention to get funding. This means an artist’s political criticism can also become a marketing tool, a symbol or a promotional image.
Ayoung Kim’s poster, which was made using generative AI and shown without its wider context, reminds us of this problem.
Theorist Victor Burgin questions whether art galleries can truly offer a meaningful criticism of AI. He argues that to understand art that challenges AI, people need background information. Simply looking at the artwork is not enough.
For Burgin, art can resist harmful influences in other ways, such as challenging stereotypes, tired ideas and beliefs built into popular images and visual culture.
Understanding AI’s effects through art
As people grow more concerned about AI replacing artists and AI spreads across many areas of creative work, it is important to discuss what artists can achieve by experimenting with this technology.
As a creative researcher, I am interested in how my experiences with a technology affect what I can learn about it. As a photographer, I think about generative AI as a technology developed using datasets made from photographs taken around the world. This also means that generative AI inherits the ways photography shows, records and remembers the world.
Generative AI appeals to people's desire to create images of almost anything, from nude images and Hollywood stars to pictures that make it seem as though dead people are alive again.
Using generative AI in creative work can begin with finding new ways to use its systems and going against what they are designed to do. This means accepting what AI cannot capture and challenging the way it works. For example, artists can use prompts to explore parts of social life that are difficult to measure or combine into data, such as feelings and physical sensations.
In this way, experimenting with art may be one of the few ways we can experience the limits of AI as it quietly and persistently spreads into more areas of our lives.
Sara Oscar is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication at the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney. This article was first published by The Conversation