Artists' AI dilemma: Can artificial intelligence create intelligent art? | Art

TTwo people dressed in black are kneeling on the ground, so still that they must surely be in pain. If they grimace, there will be no way of knowing that their features are obscured by oversized, smooth golden masks, as if they have buried their faces in half of an Easter egg.

Their stillness makes them look like sculptures, and only by checking the subtle rises and falls of their chests can you confirm that they are indeed human. Which is entirely appropriate, because they're not actually human, at least not fully. They are man-machine hybrids, Idioms, created by French artist Pierre Huyghe for his largest exhibition ever, Liminal, at the Punta della Dogana in Venice.

Idiomatic expressions run through the exhibition between March and November. Sensors placed in their masks monitor the rooms they are in and the visitors they encounter, and artificial intelligence will gradually convert this information into an entirely new language. Slowly, for example, the Idioms masks will find the words for door or humans or write a dictionary until they are able to communicate with each other. Every day their knowledge will accumulate; Huyghe wonders what they will be able to say in 20 years.

On a cool March day, shortly before the exhibition opens to the public, two Idioms kneel in a dark room in front of a large black box suspended from the ceiling. It is a self-generated instrument (also loaded with environmental sensors), producing ambient music and crisscrossing beams of light. In response to the artwork in front of them, the idiomatic expressions seem to have generated only a few syllables, repeated intermittently, over and over again, while the LED screens on their foreheads glow gold. Their words are a hissing whisper. This sounds a lot like: What is this?

That's a good question to ask. The dilemma facing any artist attempting to tackle a topic as revolutionary and impactful as artificial intelligence is that the real magic often happens on some hard drives behind the scenes. Although a blinking server is on display at the Liminal, Huyghe himself admitted at a press conference three days before the opening that it might be difficult for a casual visitor to understand that the language coming from the Idioms masks is AI-generated; he worried that visitors would assume that it was the people wearing the masks who were whispering.

For contemporary artists, there is clear pressure to tackle and engage with the hot technology that has rapidly disrupted everything from homework to journalism since ChatGPT's 2022 debut.

Like Huyghe, creators from German filmmaker Hito Steyerl to British conceptualist Gillian Wearing have used AI to create or improve their art. Shortly after the conclusion of the first edition of Liminals, an ostensibly entirely AI-based multimedia exhibition of the historic works of French artist Philippe Parreno will open at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

It's not always easy to determine whether artists are using technology in an interesting and challenging way or whether they're just hoping to ride the hype bandwagon. According to a preliminary press release from the Munich exhibition, it is unclear exactly which elements of the Parrenos exhibition will be artificially intelligent, and it is easy to see how AI could cynically be applied to an exhibition like a Instagram filter, a glossy polish that does old work. appear new.

AI is already all around us, automatically completing our emails, suggesting a new show to watch on Netflix, and reading the weather forecast with the voice of Amazon's Alexa. In recent years, chatbots have revolutionized writing by responding to invitations to write cover letters, code, plays, poems and essays, while text-to-image conversion models such as DALL.E and Midjourney allow anyone to create art by typing a few words.

But as technology becomes more and more important in our daily lives, artists' use of AI risks seeming mundane. Crowds were said to have been transfixed for an hour or more by Turkish artist Refik Anadol's vivid paintings currently on display at London's Serpentine Gallery. The AI ​​was fed images of rainforests and coral reefs to generate the Anadols exhibit, Echoes of the Earth: living archives, which features immersive artificial realities that visitors can walk through. While crowds may be stunned, critics said Anadol's previous AI-generated work was overhyped.

The whole thing looks like a huge techno lava lamp, New York Magazines Jerry Saltz wrote about Anadols without supervision, a 24-foot screen that used AI to continuously generate images at the Museum of Modern Art between 2022 and 2023. Saltz found the work pointless and mediocre, capable of briefly entertaining you but ultimately leaving nothing to disturb you. In short, he felt that the work had nothing to say.

Saltz argued that if AI is to create meaningful art, it will need to provide its own vision and vocabulary. In a literal sense, that’s exactly what Huyghes Idioms does. Watching them is strangely fascinating as a spectator, it is interesting to be confronted not with a finished state of artificial intelligence, but with a continuous process of artificial learning.

Here, Huyghe's use of AI removes the art from the artist's control, which is exciting, not least because of the possibility of things going wrong. Idioms might fail to produce language or produce one that would be jarring and offensive to our ears. They might be unduly influenced by rowdy visitors or rebel in some way, repeating the same words over and over again.

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It would undoubtedly be fascinating to return day after day and see how the idioms responded to the art around them. As Huyghe predicted, these strange masked beings spark questions about the relationship between the human and the non-human (although my first thought was, I bet their knees hurt from kneeling) .

The use of AI in his work Camata provokes less thought. Robotic limbs surround a skeleton in one of the world's driest deserts, performing a mysterious ritual. Although the footage is not live, the film is edited in real time, with artificially intelligent editors collecting data from a large brass sensor similar to a telephone pole near the exhibit's opening. This sensor monitors everything from the number of guests in the gallery to the weather outside, and Camata images are edited accordingly.

However, commissioner Anne Stenne clarifies that this is not a simple case of x leading to y. For example, if only one person was present in the exhibition, the AI ​​editors would not automatically choose, for example, images shot at night. This means that while the endless editing process is fascinating, you can, after all, sit through the entire exhibition and never see the same footage twice. It is difficult to understand, as a layman, why AI was a necessary element. Would the work be different if the montage was randomly generated? As a casual viewer, it's very difficult to know.

Indeed, those who visit these exhibitions simply have to trust that something fantastic is happening behind the scenes. Although Huyghes' sensors are visible throughout the exhibition, the artist does not want to share details of the program that processes this information and how exactly it works. A representative says: Pierre does not want to focus on the technical parameters of his works. He wants to focus on the visitor experience. The public may find this troubling in a world where companies use pseudo-AI that is actually run by humans behind the scenes.

AI art works best when it does something that the artist alone could not do, as is the case with Huyghes' self-generated language. Anything else risks seeming gimmicky at best and pointless at worst. Either way, the AI ​​trend will continue to sweep the galleries, and soon the tool will be mundane enough that questioning it will be like questioning a pen or pencil.

In the 1960s, computer art swept the world, with exhibitions from London to Stuttgart, Zagreb and Las Vegas. One contemporary writer said that perhaps a computer would never produce a painting on its own, and noted cautiously that at least one expert believes such art represents a truly new art form. One day, no doubt, discussions about the place of AI in art will seem as archaic.