Is Artificial Intelligence The Future in Art?

Sofia Crespo, an artist who hails from Argentina, created artworks with the help of artificial intelligence. She is part of the generative art movement. But, what is generative art? Generative art is a process where humans create computer rules and use algorithms to generate new forms, shapes, ideas, and patterns.

The new art discipline has started to attract huge interest among art collectors, even with more significant price tags at auctions.

For example, US artist and programmer Robbie Barrat, 22 years old, sold a work “Nude Portrait#7Frame#64” at Sotheby’s in March 2022 for £630,000 or $821,000. It happened four years after French collective Obvious sold work at Christie’s titled “Edmond de Bellamy” for $432,500.

What Is Generative Art as a Ballet Between Humans and Machines

Art collector Jason Bailey describes generative art as “ballet with machines.” 

But the budding is about to change. It is due to tech companies releasing AI tools that can create photo-realistic images in seconds.

Artists in Germany and the United States started computer-generated art during the 1960s. The London-based V&A keeps a collection of one of the critical works, a 1968 art by German artist Georg Nees dubbed “Plastik 1”. In that work, Nees used a random number generator to make a geometric design for his sculpture.

‘Babysitting’ computers

Caption: French collective Obvious sold ‘Edmond de Belamy for $432,500

Source: France 24

Today, digital artists use supercomputers and systems known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create images more complex than anything Georg Nees could have imagined. GANs refer to sets competing for AI. One generates an image from the instructions given, while the other acts as a gatekeeper, judging whether the output is accurate.

If it finds errors, GANs send the image back for revisions, and the first AI resumes work for a second try to beat the gamekeeper.

However, some artists, including Crespo and Barrat, insist that the artist is still crucial to the process.

“When I’m working like this, I’m not creating an image. I’m creating a system that can create images,” Barrat said. 

Crespo said she believed her AI machine would be a true “collaborator.” But in reality, getting even a single line of code to generate good results isn’t easy. Crespo considers as 

“babysitting” the machine.

Meanwhile, tech companies hope to introduce this idea to regular consumers. Google and Open AI are both looking at the features of new tools. They say it can potentially bring photorealism and creativity without coding skills.

The ‘transformers’

They have replaced GANs with more user-friendly AI models called “transformers” that are adept at converting everyday speech into images.

Google Imagen’s webpage is filled with images created by instructions such as “A small cactus wearing a straw hat and neon sunglasses in the Sahara desert.”

Open AI boasts that its Dalle-2 tool can offer any scenario in any artistic style, from the Flemish masters to Andy Warhol.

Although the arrival of AI has led to fears of humans being replaced by machines in fields from customer care to journalism, artists see the developments more as an opportunity than a threat.

Crespo has tried out Dalle-2 and said it was a “new level in terms of image generation in general” — although she prefers GANs.

“I don’t usually need a model that works perfectly to generate my work, as I like it more when things look indeterminate and not easily recognisable,” Crespo said.

Camille Langlois of Paris’s Pompidou Center — Europe’s most extensive collection of contemporary art — also played down any idea artists know about generative art.

She announced that machines did not yet have the “critical and innovative capacity,” adding: “The ability to generate realistic images does not make one an artist.”