COULD THOUGHTFUL 'AI ART' COUNTER AI SLOP

A thread on Reddit features a photograph of a poster advertising the National Gallery of Victoria’s upcoming triennial, an image from Ayoung Kim’s multi-channel video installation, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024).

In the image, a Korean woman is running through a crowded futuristic cityscape in a riding suit and gloves. It is drawn from the video piece about women working as gig-economy delivery drivers in dystopian Seoul besieged by an artificial intelligence that drives them to compete with one another, monitors their labour and skews their sense of time.

The work is made with AI, computer-generated imagery (CGI), video game engines and live action footage.

The Reddit comments are disparaging of the use of generative AI. They do not distinguish between art made with generative AI and AI replacing the artist entirely. They question the gallery’s decision to advertise a work foregrounding AI as an artistic medium.

There is an irony here. The comments rally against a world where AI takes over labour. But Young’s work also attends to this very problem.

The issue appears to pivot on her decision to use generative AI as an artistic medium.

AI saturation

AI infrastructure governs our everyday lives: used in warfare, driving our social feeds, analysing our facial expressions, pilfering the data we upload for harvesting by a handful of tech companies who profit from our cloud capital.

Our data feeds the datasets of commercial generative AI platforms, which saturates the internet with “AI slop”. And we cannot seem to opt out.

It is no surprise Reddit commenters are dismayed by the appearance of art made with generative AI. If art and creativity are also replaced by AI, then what of social life is left untouched by its creep?

Yet their dismay conflates AI replacing the artist, and an artist choosing to work with the technology.

So does an artist’s intention matter?

Media theorist Joanna Zylinska is careful to distinguish between two types of art made with generative AI.

She likens popular AI art to a mind numbing game of Candy Crush: when an artist uses generative AI solely for what it can do, to celebrate its capacity to turn data into visual spectacle.

Critical AI art comes down to the artwork’s capacity to make the implications of the technology visible. This includes its infrastructure, impact on labour and even understanding what it means to be a human.

- Author: Sara Oscar ( University of Technology Sydney ), The Conversation 

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