Art
The price of AI art
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Last fall, an AI-generated portrait rocked the art world selling for a staggering US$432,500 at Christie’s auction house in New York. The portrait called “Edmond de Belamy” features a slightly out-of-focus man with no nose and a blob for a mouth, dressed in what seems to be a dark frock-coat over a white-collared shirt.
From a distance, the 70 cm by 70 cm portrait printed on canvas and hung in a gilded wood frame, looks like it belongs in a museum of classical art. But upon closer inspection, the artist’s signature — the mathematical formula that created it (min G max D x [log (D(x))] + z [log (1 – D (G(z)))]) — reveals that the artist was not human.
With this astonishing achievement, we seemed poised to usher in art’s next medium — and possibly even to redefine what it means to be an artist. But in November 2019, another in the Belamy series, “La Baronne de Belamy,” sold at Sotheby’s without the same success. “La Baronne” sold for only US$25,000, just slightly more than its estimated value. Has the AI art bubble burst?
What is AI art?
The Belamy series was created via machine learning by the Paris-based arts collective known as “Obvious.” They fed thousands of portraits into an algorithm, effectively teaching the machine portraiture techniques of the 18th century. The result was a series of 11 images known as the fictional “La Famille de Belamy.”
Like the girl in Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting, “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” Edmond de Belamy does not exist. The painting instead is a “tronie,” which is derived from the Dutch word for face. A tronie exists only in the artist’s imagination. There is no story behind the painting — no wealthy member of society being immortalized on canvas, no scandal surrounding it and not even admiration for the subject of the portrait. It is the viewer’s imagination, which is forced to start afresh, that makes interpretations about what is being viewed.
In the case of “Edmond de Belamy,” it is more complicated. It is not the work of the artist’s imagination, but in fact, the work of the algorithm’s “imagination.” “Edmond de Belamy” is work of art captured by the “mind” of an artist that is not human.
(Johannes Vermeer)
Algorithm vs algorithm
The machine learning system used to create the Belamy series is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Essentially, it is a system that pits algorithms against each other in order to improve the quality of the results.
One algorithm generates data and the other competes with it, discriminating between the real and false data being produced. The entire system is described as “adversarial.”
GANs were first created in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow, a computer scientist. In a salute to Goodfellow, Obvious translated his name to be used for their series of art: good and fellow translate roughly into French as “bel ami” hence, Belamy.
But, is this really art?
GANs present us with an entirely new way of understanding art, which was once exclusively the domain of human beings. And while its products and processes may prove to be beneficial, this type of art blurs the distinction between humans and machines, raising ethical, regulatory and process conundrums in society. Can an AI be an artist? And if so, what is an artist? Or is the AI simply a tool, like a paintbrush?
Proponents of AI art see its worth not only in the end product of what it creates, like “Edmond de Belamy,” but also in the process of creating the artwork. So, for example, is the Belamy series a collaboration of artist and machine exploring new visual forms? This is not unlike the form of conceptual art where the idea behind the work and the process of creating it is more important than the outcome.
Further, if we do consider it to be art, who — or what — has the right to the art it creates? The AI itself? The group that owns the AI, like Obvious? Or the coder of the algorithm?
Obvious
This question arose, in fact, with the success of “Edmond de Belamy.” While Obvious claimed responsibility for the 11 portraits in the Belamy series, a teenager developed the code responsible for the series.
Robbie Barrat, at the age of 17, started experimenting with AI and art, and uploaded the code he had used to make paintings to GitHub, a code-sharing platform that enabled others to download and learn from it.
Obvious has never denied that their work has relied on others — a fact evident in their homage to Goodfellow (“bel ami”) and also in acknowledging the work of Robbie Barrat on their website. But it raises more questions about the right to the artwork and where we should draw the line.
The AI art bubble may have burst, but the questions of what is art and who is the artist raised by AI art remain.
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
The work of Victoria West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, was recently showcased at an immersive exhibit in the Big Apple.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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