Artistic Process Futures and AI

Given the speed with which artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are emerging and becoming adopted, the need to engage target audiences to weigh in on possible AI futures is critical. Our project seeks to explore the role and potential implications of AI technologies with artists.

At present, the involvement of AI in the artistic process is still ambiguous. AI tools might be just the latest in a long tradition of support tools that let us offload cognition so we can do more creative thinking – or they might pose a threat not only to human creativity but to life on Earth as we know it. (We shall see.) Immediate questions about art and AI include what role and form AI technologies should assume, and how artists can use AI tools responsibly considering the political and social reach of the machine-learning approaches upon which such technologies are based (e.g. ensuring algorithmic bias is not hard-wired around Western aesthetics).

To support artists in disambiguating and cultivating a vision of their artistic process as related to current advances in AI, we aimed to guide artists, both amateur and professional, from sculptors to installation artists, in (1) exploring scenarios at the crossroads of art and AI; (2) making these scenarios tangible through the design of speculative artifacts; and (3) articulating an artistic and epistemological point of view in the form of a collaborative manifesto.