AI-Human Collaborative Art

The Idea

Artificial intelligence is not intelligence. But, that doesn't mean that it's not worthy of study and investigation.

Some brilliant, albeit not very self-reflective, humans have cobbled together golems out of linear algebra, and trained these golems to, among other things, make images. At times, the actions of these golems bear a superficial resemblance to intelligence. That resemblance is only superficial, though; we don't understand intelligence enough to replicate it, and it doesn't take much interrogation of artificial intelligence to discover that its method of “thinking” bears little resemblance to thought.

But, the fact that it's poorly named is not a reason to discard it. Whatever this new system we've created is, it's capable of doing things that machines were never before capable of.

The radical difference between how AI “thinks” and how humans think is, in my mind, demonstrated well when AI fails. Botched AI art, in particular, shows not just the cracks in AI intelligence, but the nature of AI intelligence. When it composes images that defy reason, this is because it does not reason, and what it substitutes for spacial reasoning has a magnificent surrealism to it.

To play in this space, I've been commissioning a series of art works which are (human) reimaginings of AI-botched art. I think the juxtaposition of AI failure and human triumph is artistic even on its own merits, but of course the surrealism-realism juxtaposition is the more obvious beauty of these works.

In this AI-Human Collaborative Art series, I am neither the AI nor the human. The artist is the human. I try to be extremely hands-off when commissioning these works, as I don't want to taint the artist's thought process with my own. I hope that each work reflects something about its artist (and, something about the AI).

Current Works

Future Works

Interested in making a work in this series? Contact me by email or social media.

Thusfar I have only commissioned conventional visual art, i.e., paintings both digital and physical. While I am certainly open to more art of that form, I am also open to anything else. If you're an artist and this idea has inspired you, I'm probably interested.