When it comes to creativity, is artificial intelligence a powerful new tool or an existential threat? A San Francisco gallery is taking on this question in a new exhibition: “Artificial Imagination” features eight artists who used A.I. image generators to create the pieces on display.
The artists’ methods vary: Some fed their A.I. tool of choice phrases to generate their entire piece, while others created illustrations or sculptures based on the tool’s recommendations. The show is on view at bitforms’ West Coast gallery through the end of the year.
From robots that make their own art to image-generation tools that mimick history’s greatest painters, A.I. is quickly permeating creative spaces—and generating lots of questions. Is it a medium or a method, a tool or a technique? And does an artist fully own their art if they didn’t design the technology themselves? As the quality of A.I. art rapidly improves, these conversations have never been more timely.
“Machine-learning programs that can produce sometimes jaw-dropping images from brief text prompts have advanced in a matter of months from a ‘that’s quite a trick’ stage to a genuine cultural disruption,” writes Axios’ Scott Rosenberg.
Fang Yuan’s Kundalini #1
Courtesy of the artist
Bitforms focuses on “artists critically engaged with new technologies,” according to its website. In this exhibition, the gallery hopes to provoke discussion about A.I. as a tool that can “alter, enhance and extend creative processes.”
“I think it is really important to showcase right now that this is a new medium,” Ellie Pritts, one of the artists on display, tells Axios’ Ina Fried. “There are serious artists; this is legitimate work.”
Dan Gentile, culture editor at SF Gate, is far more skeptical. “Given the questionable ethical behavior of many tech companies, being a technological optimist is hard these days. This type of art show doesn’t make it any easier,” he writes. “A.I. has boundless possibilities; in this use case, it has the power to democratize the creation of art, breaking the limits of craft and essentially serving as an imagination translator. Or it can just be a bulls—t generator.”
The DALL-E 2 image generator, which was a popular tool for this exhibition’s artists, is already quite simple to operate. The user inputs a phrase—for example, “a group of teddy bears in ancient Egypt, as a crayon drawing”—and the tool spits out images.
Ellie Pritts’ Bitter Recursion
Courtesy of the artist
Some of the artists on display were forthcoming about the phrases they used to create their pieces, while others were more reticent. Alexander Reben, who has two sculptures and a digital painting in the show, refused to divulge his prompt language, calling it his “secret sauce,” per SF Gate. But he did share what the A.I. tool gave him: instructions for how to make his sculptures. The full instructions are on display next to his work.
August Kamp, who has two works in the show, is willing to share her prompts. One of them was something like, “cosmonaut who is experiencing heartbreak on another planet.”
“I love the idea that my art is not owned. I love the idea that if somebody sees my piece and thinks, I would love that style, but for this idea of mine—take it,” she tells SF Gate. “That’s my entire draw to this type of technology.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
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