Preface:

Machine art is suddenly hot, with the first AI painting sold at auction for 30 million yuan. Many museums and galleries are already hosting exhibitions of AI art.

The future of ai art is not so much about “image making” as it is about realizing its key potential for the industrialization of AI.

Computer Art:

Artists have been using computers to create works since at least the late 1950s. When a group of engineers at the University of Stuttgart’s Max Spence laboratory began experimenting with computer graphics, Artists such as Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Manfred Mohr, and Vera Molnr also began to explore the use of mainframe computers, plotters, and algorithms to create visual art.

As Fred Nack recalls, what began as an exercise in testing new equipment in Benz’s lab quickly became an art movement — Max Benz provided a theoretical framework for the art form, as opposed to fascism. Bence argues that the literal “computational” aesthetic of computer art deliberately avoids all emotional appeals and thus insulates it from political attacks.

Of course, the legacy from Fred Nack’s early experiments with the Zuse graphicgraph to the work of contemporary ai artists such as Helena Salino is less than half a century old.

In other words, the art of artificial intelligence becomes more interesting if we use early examples of computer art to understand it. We can even say that early computer art provided the missing theoretical framework for contemporary art of artificial intelligence.

Is an AI gold rush coming?

A recent suggestion is that there is a “gold rush” for ARTIFICIAL intelligence. In contrast to the extreme media hype surrounding AI, especially neural network-based AI art, ai art currently accounts for only a tiny fraction of the established art world. At the moment, the art of AI is largely an internal game, with a small number of protagonists driving a lot of aesthetic and critical output. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, as the idea of contemporary art was once meant to be distinct from large institutions and markets (i.e., the niche), a fact that is easily overlooked in the narrative of the current ai art epidemic.

A major case in point has been collectors’ recent purchases of so-called “ai art” works, the most notable example being the Sale by French collective auction house of a generic gold-plated sample of a Gan-generated portrait of Robbie Barat at Christie’s for $432.500.

Key applications of ARTIFICIAL intelligence:

Here’s a prediction: once GANs becomes a proper Photoshop filter, as we can see from the work of David Bau and others, the problem of imitation will be solved. At the very least, it will no longer be the focus of aesthetic exploration of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, any more than artistic access to the Internet is regarded as web art.

Instead, artists will eventually embrace the key application of AI art: criticizing yourself with ai. As Walter Benjamin said in The Author As Producer, The power of technical art lies in its ability to stand in The relationship of production and actively shape The way of using certain technologies, rather than merely providing aesthetic comments from onlookers. The future of AI art has already begun, with Kyle McDonald, an artist who works in machine learning, Posting a top-of-the-line article on gAn-generated faces and how to spot artificial Ai-generated fake images.

In other words, the art of ARTIFICIAL intelligence will be a driver of innovation, but not of aesthetic innovation, as Fred Nack suggested 50 years ago, but of key innovation. Just as abstraction is a critique of painting realism, ai art will be a medium for critique of “realistic” AI, that is, ai is available only when it is assumed to be a proper medium in the real world (just as ImageNet is assumed to be a valid and exhaustive sample of the real world).

These are exciting times for science and art. However, we are not in the middle of an artistic revolution, and artists are in danger of being replaced by machines at any moment. What is often overlooked is that the (non-trivial) progress of art, like the progress of science, is built on a history of invention and discovery, some of which will evolve, others will be questioned and overturned.