As more and more artificial intelligence models begin operating in the art world the potential implications are only just beginning to be felt. As award-winning art critic Shana Nys Dambrot notes in her latest essay, “Many are captivated by the universe of possibilities that open up when an artist is in direct contact with an archive of visual learning stretching back and across all recorded history; many remain skeptical of what they see as outsourcing human creativity to a database machine. The former will make the case that the study of art history, for example, is already akin to accessing such a database, except now it’s one that’s more complete and quick than a human brain; the latter will remain unconvinced and evoke the notions of mistakes and the soul of intuition.”
Questions of creative originality, appropriation, and copyrights, in an environment where “it’s ludicrously easy to borrow and steal another artist’s style—just by typing their name into the program,” are coming to the fore.
Click here to read Dambrot’s full story and to see examples of AI-generated artworks. —VV editors