PARIS — To many, they are art’s next big
thing — digital images of jellyfish pulsing and blurring in a dark pink sea or
dozens of butterflies fusing together into a single organism.
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The Argentine artist
Sofia Crespo, who created the
works with the help of artificial intelligence, is part of the “generative art”
movement, where humans create rules for computers which then use algorithms to
generate new forms, ideas, and patterns.
The field has begun to attract huge interest among
art collectors — and even bigger price tags at auctions.
US artist and programmer Robbie Barrat — a prodigy
still only 22 years old — sold a work called “Nude Portrait#7Frame#64” at
Sotheby’s in March for $821,000.
That came almost four years after French collective
Obvious sold a work at Christie’s titled “Edmond de Belamy” — largely based on
Barrat’s code — for $432,500.
A ballet with machines
Collector Jason Bailey told
AFP that generative art was “like a ballet between humans and machines”.
But the nascent scene could already be on the verge
of a major shake-up as tech companies begin to release AI tools that can whip
up photo-realistic images in seconds.
Artists in
Germany and the US blazed a trail in
computer-generated art during the 1960s.
The V&A museum in London keeps a collection
going back more than half a century, one of the key works being a 1968 piece by
German artist Georg Nees called “Plastik 1”.
Nees used a random number generator to create a
geometric design for his sculpture.
‘Babysitting’ computers
Nowadays, digital artists
work with supercomputers and systems known as Generative Adversarial Networks
(GANs) to create images far more complex than anything Nees could have dreamed
of.
GANs are sets of competing AIs — one generates an
image from the instructions it is given, and the other acts as a gatekeeper,
judging whether the output is accurate.
If it finds fault, it sends the image back for
tweaks, and the first AI gets back to work for a second try to beat the
gamekeeper.
But artists like Crespo and Barrat insist that the
artist is still central to the process, even if their working methods are not
traditional.
“When I’m working this way, I’m not creating an
image. I’m creating a system that can create images,” Barrat told AFP.
Crespo said she thought her
AI machine would be a
true “collaborator”, but in reality it is incredibly tough to get even a single
line of code to generate satisfactory results.
She said it was more like “babysitting” the machine.
Tech companies are now hoping to bring a slice of
this rarefied action to regular consumers.
Google and Open AI are both touting the merits of
new tools they say bring photorealism and creativity without the need for
coding skills.
Enter the ‘transformers’
They have replaced GANs with
more user-friendly AI models called “transformers” that are adept at converting
everyday speech into images.
Google Imagen’s webpage is filled with absurdist
images generated by instructions such as: “A small cactus wearing a straw hat
and neon sunglasses in the Sahara desert.”
Open AI boasts that its Dalle-2 tool can offer any
scenario in any artistic style from the Flemish masters to Andy Warhol.
Although the arrival of AI has led to fears of
humans being replaced by machines in fields from customer care to journalism,
artists see the developments more as an opportunity than a threat.
Crespo has tried out Dalle-2 and said it was a “new
level in terms of image generation in general” — though she prefers her GANs.
“I very often don’t need a model that is very
accurate to generate my work, as I like very much when things look
indeterminate and not easily recognizable,” she said.
Camille Lenglois of Paris’s Pompidou Center —
Europe’s largest collection of contemporary art — also played down any idea
that artists were about to be replaced by machines.
She told AFP that machines did not yet have the “critical
and innovative capacity”, adding: “The ability to generate realistic images
does not make one an artist.”
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