Viewed by some as a crisis, a group of artists and art world leaders are partnering with artificial intelligence to strengthen the industry’s present and plot a brighter future.
Artificial intelligence has become a worldwide phenomena, wooing investors with its promise of improving efficiency and reducing manpower. While it threatens to upend everything from white-collar work to term paper composition, the art world is wrestling with its predicted effect. Stylistic derivatives can be created through ingesting entire catalogs of artwork. Computer-generated imagery materializes with a few simple prompts. For this reason, some in the industry have come to view today’s AI as the comet’s bright light before the impact. However, Knight Foundation, along with the artists, leaders, and institutions it supports, envisions a different future: that of collaboration, synergy, and progress. “I’m very pro-A.I.,” says Knight grant awardee Kelani Nichole, a technologist and founder of TRANSFER, an experimental media art space. “But what’s crucial is having a critical orientation to A.I. and how it’s emerging.”
For multidisciplinary artist Lee Pivnik, his first thought was how A.I.’s nimble imagination could tackle the challenge of climate change — a threat that’s top of mind for his native Miami, Fla. “This is going to be an interesting tool for the future of what architecture could look like,” Pivnik says. The result is Symbiotic House, a 2022 project presented at Knight Foundation’s Catalyst Forum last year. The compilation of A.I.-generated structures from a variety of artists imagines everyday life in a changed environment. Rather than fear, Pivnik sees hope, and because of that, enthusiasm. “I’m more on the optimist side,” he says.
For others, A.I.’s predictive dominance in the future means the obligation today to offer input on its boundaries and values. “We collectively have determined what we don’t want this technology to do, but we haven’t decided what we do want it to do,” says Dr. Madeline Gannon, dubbed “the Robot Whisperer” and a Foundation grant awardee. “That’s where artists can come and bring their own narratives and personalities and value sets to make that conversation wider.”
Nichole echoes Dr. Gannon’s thoughts. “[For artists], it’s not only how you’re credited or how your data is used, but also the control you have over that data, your ability to defend those rights,” she says. “Those are things that artists need to be thinking about right now, because A.I. is not going to stop.”
Through the support of Knight Foundation, artists are leaning into A.I. and its possible impacts, beginning a dialogue that will shape the future of not only the technology, but of the world itself. Some, like transdisciplinary artist Stephanie Dinkins, take that literally. Guggenheim-winner Dinkins is continuing a project begun in 2014 in which she records conversations between herself and an A.I. Black woman. Conversations with Bina48: Fragments 7, 6, 5, 2, presented at Knight Foundation’s Catalyst Forum in 2023, was born from the desire to broaden representation within A.I. so that it is equally impactful a multicultural world. “If we’re going to build a world more and more based on technologies, what does it mean when we’re not well represented in that technology?” she says. “That seems like a poor world to start building, and I wanted to think about how to build a world that is rich and nuanced.”
