10/4/23, 10:12 AM How will artificial intelligence (AI) affect art?

ow will artificial intelligence (AI) affect art? 10/4/23, 10:12 AM How will artificial intelligence (AI) affect art?

For Kim Leutwyler, an artist and six-time Archibald Prize finalist, this raised a red flag. “I
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was very sceptical about where the source of all of this imagery was coming from,” they tell
me from their Sydney studio. After some digging they discovered “there were hundreds, if
Culture Art & design Visual art
not thousands of artists saying that their work had been completely ripped off – their exact
This was published 9 months ago colour, composition, style; these things that they’ve been working for years to develop.”
Leutwyler, it turned out, was one of them.
What does the rise of AI mean for the future of art?
After being directed to a website that allows users to search the databases being used to
train Lensa and other AI art-generating apps, “I uploaded my own work and saw that al‐
By Elizabeth Flux Over the last few weeks, my social media feeds had most every painting, every portrait I’ve ever shared on the internet was on there.” They
December 23, 2022 — 2.41pm been overflowing with albums of selfies. That in it‐ were far from alone. “I found Blak Douglas, Vincent Namatjira, Yvette Coppersmith, Del
self isn’t very unusual. What set these selfies apart, Kathryn Barton, my friends, and really prominent Australian artists whose work is being
however, were that they were more like portraits used without their knowledge, without their consent, and without any compensation.”
commissioned from artists. Lots of artists.
With AI becoming more prominent, not just across art but across all areas of life, what does
a situation like this mean for artists and the future of the creative industries?

Are artists at risk of becoming obsolete?

“A year or two back if you’d asked me whether graphic design was a safe job, I’d have said,
yes, it was pretty safe job – anything in the creative industries is a pretty safe job from rac‐
ing against the machines. But now, actually, I would be somewhat worried if I was a graphic
designer,” says Toby Walsh, professor of AI at the University of NSW.

Artist Kim Leutwyler. STEVEN SIEWERT

Albums would be filled with pictures of the same person in an array of styles. Some looked
like oil paintings, others like scenes from anime. With every swipe, my friends appeared
through a different lens, as though they had been reimagined by a team of different artists.
As it turns out, this was the truth – kind of. They’d used the app Lensa, which for a fee al‐
lows users to upload a series of selfies and in return get an album full of “avatars” created
by AI.

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He highlights how the world is incredibly data-rich, across business, finance, health, educa‐
Toby Walsh: "People think of Australia as the land of the fair go, and that should be true of the technologies we build
too." JEREMY PIPER tion, and how all the information pulsing through society is becoming increasingly con‐
nected. “We’re looking at a future where, across lots of different aspects of society, AI will
With artists like Leutwyler’s work being used to train apps, Walsh says, “they’re right to be Quantum Memories by Refik Anadol is a work of art created by harnessing a dataset drawn from over two hundred mil‐
lion images linked to nature from publicly available internet resources and processed using quantum computing with
angry because there’s great value being generated here, and it’s not being shared with the machine learning algorithms. REFIK ANADOL STUDIO
people whose art from which it was derived.” He questions whether or not this is sustain‐
able, both for artists and these programs. If AI-generated work takes money, recognition
be increasingly used to process huge quantities of data,” says McEoin. As an institution, he
and opportunities away from artists, many of them will stop producing art. “We have to
says, the gallery plays a role in recording these changes as they progress and asking ques‐
work out ways to ensure that the people on whose work the systems depend do get some
tions about what it all means. “How do we help the public understand what some of the
sort of reward, so that they continue to produce art that will continue to be used to train
implications of these things will be?”
future systems”.
He points to Quantum Memories by Refik Anadol, which was displayed in the NGV as part
At present, AI is directed by humans, so “in training AI generally there’s a moral responsi‐
of the Triennial.
bility on the people who are doing the training to think about where they’re directing this
capability,” says Ewan McEoin, senior curator of contemporary art, design and architecture
at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Can AI and the art world happily coexist?

As AI rapidly evolves, it’s difficult for protections to keep pace – this opens up conversa‐
tions about how to protect existing work while also looking at the creative potential of AI.
McEoin is riding his bike to the gallery when he pulls over to speak to me, our conversation
soundtracked by birdsong and gentle breeze. “We need to remember that AI is a tool – and
it’s a tool that’s not specifically developed to make art,” he reflects. “It’s a tool that’s capa‐
ble of dealing with huge quantities of data.”

Artist Refik Anadol has been working with AI for seven years. EFSUN ERKILIC

The mesmerising work, displayed on a giant LED screen was created by directing a quan‐
tum computer to process around 200 million images of nature and landscapes in a data‐
base owned by Google then asking it to look for patterns and commonalities. “What Refik
asked it to do was to learn from that and recreate landscapes, imagined landscapes,” says
McEoin. The result is a constantly changing series of moving images that are at once famil‐
iar and alien. “The work is a never-ending generative exploration of this information.”

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10/4/23, 10:12 AM How will artificial intelligence (AI) affect art?
AI has actually been part of art for a while
Anadol’s artwork has been inextricably linked with technology since almost the beginning.
“I’ve been programming computers to make art since 14 years”, he tells me. Seven years
ago he started working with AI at Google as an artist in residence. “So we are a pioneer stu‐
dio, because seven years with AI is like 70 years,” he adds with a laugh.
AI being used to increase the potential of art, to broaden what is possible is an idea that
Walsh raised. “I think the best way to envisage artificial intelligence is something that aug‐
ments us. We’ve always picked up and used tools, and here’s a new tool that will allow
many of us to make much more beautiful art than we could without the tool.”
The work Refik Anadol Studio creates is diverse and displayed all over the world, using
technology to probe ideas in unexpected ways – in one work, Melting Memories, Anadol
uses EEG data as a way to try and present the concept of memory visually.
Insight into the creation process behind Melting Memories. REFIK ANADOL STUDIO.
All of the studio’s work requires drawing on huge amounts of data and pools of informa‐
tion, but they make sure to put a fence around it. “In our work, we always try to emphasise
where the AI comes from, where data comes from, what kind of tools we use. I’m extremely
open about our approach,” he tells me.
Anadol is an optimist – the joy he feels in his work is clear in every sentence he utters.
When asked how he came to AI in the first place, he tells me he loves to learn. “Some peo‐
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10/4/23, 10:12 AM How will artificial intelligence (AI) affect art?
ple call it nerd some people call it curious,” he says with a laugh.
He also mentions he is a fan of sci-fi. But isn’t AI – autonomous AI anyway – often por‐
trayed in a negative light in sci-fi I ask. “I highly believe that these technologies can create
a problem for humanity for sure,” he replies, highlighting privacy and free will in particu‐
lar. “What we read, what we watch, what we buy, eat … wherever we go is all defined by ma‐
chines”. Artists, he reflects, have a role in bringing awareness, and he is interested in sub‐
verting the negatives and seeing how they can be made positive. “What else can we do with
the same technologies and the systems imposed on us? How can we turn them into cre‐
ative outputs? How can we use them to enhance our cognitive capacity? How can we use AI
as a means of extension of the human mind?”
A look at the creation process behind the artwork Melting Memories, which draws on EEG data. REFIK ANADOL STUDIO
Anadol’s work opens up many questions and possibilities. Quantum Memories gives view‐
ers an indication of what AI sees when it looks at the natural world. “It will be able to see
not only the beauty of nature, but also the damage caused to nature by human beings,”
says McEoin. “If AI was asked to do something about this situation, what would it do?“
This is just the beginning
McEoin underscores the fact that these are early days for AI and art, and that it will be in‐
teresting to see where things go. “This is like a baby learning to paint, these images that
we’re seeing at the moment.” Currently, AI-created images and artwork are still human-
led. He’s curious though. “What kind of art would AI make if you matched up a quantum
computer, and AI and the internet?
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“Although at the moment, it’s an aesthetic thing that we’re looking at, I would be very in‐
terested to understand the topics, the subject matter, the discourses that AI wants to have
with us, because we’re not at that point yet.”
So, what happens to artists now?
Whether AI poses a direct risk to artists – that they could simply be replaced by machines
learning from all that humans have created before them – is a tricky thing to answer.
Across the academics, artists and curators I speak to, all of them point to something inde‐
finable that forms a layer of protection, though not all of them are referring to the same
thing. There’s the fact that what art actually is can’t be nailed down, even between people.
“We also have to remember that just making an image with AI is not necessarily making
art,” says McEoin. “There’s a big difference between taking a photograph and taking a pho‐
tograph that is considered as part of an artistic movement or art form.”
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Anadol agrees. “Just prompting an image isn’t art at all,” he tells me. “The question is re‐
ally what we do with that, and how we use it for the artistic context.”
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10/4/23, 10:12 AM How will artificial intelligence (AI) affect art?
Walsh draws my attention to the fact that photography didn’t destroy painting. “Art is
more than just making images that are realistic. It’s about asking questions, and addressing
aspects of the human condition, whether that’s about falling in love and losing loved ones
and human mortality and all of the troubling questions that art helps us to think about,”
he tells me. “Machines aren’t going to speak to us in the same way that artists speak to us
because they don’t share our humanity.”
We reached out to the Art Gallery of New South Wales to ask about whether works created
in part by AI would be eligible for the Archibald Prize but were told no one was available to
comment.
Leutwyler is positive about AI and advancements in technology. Their concern lies with the
issues of trust and consent when work is used without permission or compensation.
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“I think that technology can be used in many ways to transform your artwork, take you in a
direction that you didn’t expect. But the artificial intelligence, specifically the ones that are
pulling from sources without people’s consent, just feels like forgery and theft to me,” they
explain. “I think there’s certainly merit and value to artificial intelligence in general. It can
be used for really wonderful great good things in the world. But this is an example where
it’s been used for bad.”
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Elizabeth Flux

Elizabeth Flux is Arts Editor at The Age.

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