Machine or Muse? How AI is redefining visual art

When a painting by an AI robot sold for over a million dollars at Sotheby’s last month, it re-ignited an age-old debate: What is art?

AI God: Portrait of Alan Turing – a tribute to the mathematician, computer science pioneer, and founding father of AI – was created by the humanoid Ai-Da Robot, using cameras in her eyes, artificial intelligence algorithms, and her robotic arm.

Montreal-based artist and Oboro art centre video manager Cristo Riffo

Ai-Da Robot was developed by a multidisciplinary team led by British gallerist Aidan Meller. “Ai-Da is a machine with a fusion of electronic/AI/human inputs,” they explain. “Ai-Da’s work is art because it reflects the enormous integration of technology in today’s society.”

“Ai-Da is a machine with a fusion of electronic/AI/human inputs. Ai-Da’s work is art because it reflects the enormous integration of technology in today’s society.” – The Ai-Da Robot Project

Not surprisingly, many human artists disagree, dismissing AI art as soulless and a threat to authentic creativity. Job displacement is also a concern for commercial photographers, illustrators, and designers, who are struggling to compete with the turnaround times and cost efficiency of user-friendly generative computer vision models. Montreal’s planetarium and a local museum were recently called out on social media for using AI-generated images and promotional materials, but this pivot to AI image generation is a trend that seems unlikely to slow.

Montreal-based artist and Oboro art centre video manager Cristo Riffo, meanwhile, views AI from a different perspective. “I think this fear (that AI will replace artists) is more specific to people that create images, like drawings and paintings.”

Pointe-A-Calliere’s controversial AI-generated
promotional materials

While Riffo stresses these artists need to be protected, especially regarding their intellectual property rights, he says “there is a whole other landscape of artists that use AI as a way of making decisions, or for the management of robotic or video installations. This is where AI opens new possibilities.”

Riffo collaborated with local coder and computer scientist Jonathan Wilansky and leveraged 1960s cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model algorithms to develop his recent AI-powered work, Sistema Cinco – Non-Human Determinations.

The installation premiered last year at the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria and went up this April at the Elektra Montreal Gallery. It explores the interdependencies and relationships of microorganisms (nematodes, rotifers, etc.) via live projections from a hacked microscope and drone mappings of the organisms’ origin terrains, “inviting viewers to find connections and similarities between the microcosms in manners of scale, form and shape.” As it continuously monitors the organisms, the algorithm also continuously cares for them, Tamagotchi-style.

“I’m using AI to showcase the possibility of a different world in which AI can actually make a better society.” – Montreal artist Cristo Riffo

Non Human Determinations by Cristo Riffo

“I think about how, before, we were so optimistic about technology, especially in the 1970s, we thought it was going to change our lives for the better,” says Riffo. “And now, I’m using AI to showcase the possibility of a different world in which AI can actually make a better society. I like the notion that there are other ways of imagining the future through the creation of new technologies.”

In 1839, French academic artist Paul Delaroche is said to have remarked, upon viewing a recently unveiled daguerreotype photograph, “From today, painting is dead.” That was an overreaction, as Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstract Expressionism would prove. Photography also flourished, and spawned new art forms like film and video art, conceptual art, and now, digital and AI art.

So, what is art? Says the Ai-Da Robot Project: “Today, a dominant mind-set is that of humanism, where art is an entirely human affair, stemming from human agency. However, current thinking suggests we are edging away from humanism, into a time where machines and algorithms influence our behaviour to a point where our ‘agency’ isn’t just our own. Ai-Da creates art, because art no longer has to be restrained by the requirement of human agency alone.”

The real question might be: Can human-machine artistic collaborations surpass what either could achieve alone?