Is AI art really art? This California show says yes



CNN Business

With the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence for image generation, prof question has rolled Art World: Can AI create art?

At the bitforms show in San Francisco, the answer is yes. An exhibition called Artificial Imagination runs through late December and features works created or inspired by the DALL-E generative AI system as well as other types of AI. with DALL-E and other similar systems such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney-User can write words and restore an image.

Stephen Sachs, who founded the original Bitforms gallery in New York in 2001 (the San Francisco location opened in 2020), has always focused on working with artists at the intersection of Art and technology. But this may be the first art presentation focused on DALL-E, created by OpenAI, and the first by Sacks that focuses directly on work created with AI, he told CNN Business.

The use of technologies such as 3D printing and Photoshop is common in art. But new text-to-image systems like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney can produce great-looking images at lightning speed, unlike anything the art world has seen before. In just a matter of months, millions of people have flocked to these AI systems and they are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers, and photos to illustrate news stories. However, as these systems are gaining ground, they are also generating controversy. For example, when an image created with Midjourney recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, it caused an uproar among artists.

For Sachs, generative AI systems such as DALL-E are “just another tool,” he said, noting that throughout history artists have used past works to create new work in various ways.

“He’s a great partner creatively,” he said.

“Artificial Fiction” spans multiple media and different styles, and includes artists known for using technology in their work, such as Anatolian companion, and others more recent in it. They range from Anadol’s 30-minute computer video loop in an ever-changing landscape to Marina Zorko’s bright photo collages, created with the help of DALL-E, that resemble Soviet propaganda mixed with old-fashioned stories.

Sacks said The exhibition, which is presented by bitforms and venture capital firm Day One Ventures, is in many ways an educational show about the state of DALL-E and how artists use AI.

Marina Zurkov used DALL-E to help create the 2022 trailer

Many of the pieces are more explicit in their use of artificial intelligence, and DALL-E in particular, like August Kamp’s 2022 print, “New Experimental, State of the Art,” which looks like a close-up of a futuristic retro stereo on a spaceship. Camp said she began creating it by writing what she calls a primer — a string of words like “grainy,” “detailed,” “cinematic,” “fixed film” — intended To evoke the aesthetic she wanted, which in this case was meant to look like she was watching a movie and had paused it, she said. Then she added lyrics in hopes of generating electronic synthesizers that “sounded as weird as they sound,” she says.

The final piece is a combination of the 30 or so different images created, which were outnumbered Section by Section – A process that uses artificial intelligence to enlarge the image by adding more elements to it. Kamp also used Photoshop to edit the overall image.

Camp noted that the general idea of ​​art galleries gives off a sense that good art is rare, but she sees generative AI tools like DALL-E as a way to get people to think that art can be abundant (like making it) so that anyone can wake up from a vivid dream, write a description of what he imagined, and create a picture that expresses his thoughts).

She said, “For me, art should be very abundant because I see it as an expression of love and feelings, which I think are abundant things.”

Alexandre Repin, Ceci N'est Pas Une Barriere, 2020.

Some of the pieces on display use AI in an indirect (and perhaps silly) way, such as the 2020 sculpture by Alexander Repin It’s called “Cesi N’est Pas Une Barriere”. Repin used artificial intelligence as a kind of art director: he used a GPT-3 text generator and a custom set of algorithms to generate a description of a non-existent artwork that hung on the wall of a gallery of bitforms. It includes the title, the name of a fictional artist – Norifen Storgenberg, listed as “Swedish, born 1973” – and text like “It’s very homegrown, and yet it’s very oppressive” and “The police case use of handcuffs is striking. In the context of society, they are used To restrain the prisoners, however, they are used here to create a barrier between the viewer and the action.”

Repin built his sculpture, also hanging on the wall, around description, with elements including green roof panels, porch light, metal grab bars, and handcuffs.

“I just wanted to show it out there: There’s a group of artists, and here are different ways of presenting this kind of work, living with that kind of work, connecting with that kind of work,” Sachs said. “I wanted people to ask questions about it.”

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