In the age of AI art, what can originality look like? | Eileen Isagon Skyers

I want you to envision a single piece of artwork generated by artificial intelligence. When most of us think of AI art, I bet we're imagining something like this. We're all probably picturing something totally different. Today, with machine learning models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, we've seen AI produce everything from strange life forms to imaginary influencers to entirely foreign, curious kinds of imagery. AI as a technology is fascinating to us because we're inherently drawn to things we cannot understand. And with neural networks processing data from thousands of other images made by people from every possible generation, every art movement, millions of images in one simple scan, they can produce visuals that are so familiar yet strikingly unfamiliar. More poetically, AI mirrors us. The world is beginning to change right before our very eyes, and it's basically divided into two schools of thought. There are pessimists who think AI poses a great threat to human creativity. And then optimists who see it as an extension of our creativity. So is it even possible to be truly original as an artist anymore? How do we begin to critically engage with artworks made by machines? We can start by looking at some metaphors, narratives and insights from artists who are truly pushing the boundaries of AI. Let's look to these moments of delight, surprise, confusion and wonder that give us just one small glimpse into the possibilities of encounter with this technology. Because as we've seen, this is a very moral and ethical encounter as much as an aesthetic one. Mario Klingemann sold this piece on auction in 2019. It is running an AI model trained on thousands of portraits from the 17th to 19th centuries. The model constantly reveals uncanny interpretations of the human face. Each one is unique, generated in real time as the machine reads its own output. For the viewer, it's almost like peering into the machine's hallucinations as it conjures each new portrait. Sofia Crespo's series "Neural Zoo" uses neural network interpretations of the real world to generate unreal sea creatures and diverse biological forms. Frogs look like flowers. Translucent jellyfish have vivid internal organs. There’s no one real creature in these images, but AI allows us to envision otherworldly lifeforms in impossible detail. This abstract piece by Sara Ludy began as a digital painting. It was augmented to fit a 16-by-9 ratio, using a prompt for "torn edges" in DALL-E 2's Outpainting. Outpainting allows artists to extend their creativity beyond the frame using simple language prompts like "torn edges." This piece by Ivona Tau might read as a photograph, but it is also the work of AI. It's the result of GAN training on thousands of images from the artist's personal photo collection. Tau curates from her own photographs, carefully choosing the inputs and outputs for the model. In many ways, AI art is a form of curation. It becomes the process of selecting from hundreds of images at a time. This video pulls from models trained on a massive data set of Tau's photos, resulting in a kind of algorithmic memory. But she also created a destructed data set for the model to symbolize forgetting or fleeting memory. And finally, we have Claire Silver. Silver has called herself a “collaborative AI artist” in that she works intentionally with the machine to produce her art. Her process is constantly evolving as the tools evolve. She often works with inpainting techniques, masking and transforming just one small piece of an image. For this portrait, she shifted the opacity of various sections with an Apple pencil, transforming it bit by bit. She likens this technique to her version of glazing in oil painting. Silver feeds AI-generated images from one model into another, effectively creating new forms of language and understanding for the machine itself. Her work is half master painting, half digital art. Both old and new. This piece pulls inspiration from famed artists like John Singer Sargent, Evelyn De Morgan and Gustav Klimt, almost as an homage. Because different AI models are trained on different sets of information, it's almost like they're all speaking different languages. AI is everywhere now. We are all now collectively co-creating with AI, whether we're aware of it or not. If we want to be a part of these worlds, we cannot design alone. If we want to be culturally literate in these new kinds of images and predictions and forms, then looking to the work of artists is a very productive place to start. We need to brace ourselves for an increasingly technological future, which is only going to multiply all the creative possibilities at our fingertips now. Thank you. (Applause)