Image: Living Architecture : Casa Batlló by Refik Anadol
Is AI set to revolutionise the art world or does it spell the end of human creativity? With the help of leading market participants, Andrew Shirley - editor of our Luxury Insights Report on Art, AI and the Future of Creativity - paints a picture of what the future might hold.
“Art is dead dude. It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.”
It’s a measure of our nervous fascination with AI that the New York Times ran with these hyperbolic musings from the 2022 winner of the usually unreported Colorado State Fair’s digital art competition.
What made Jason Allen’s $300-winning Théâtre D’opéra Spatial so newsworthy – and to some deeply worrying - was that the work, a kind of Isaac Asimov-meets-the-Edwardians pastiche, was created almost entirely by the generative AI platform Midjourney. Allen’s role was restricted to punching in text instructions and some light post-production editing.
But how concerned should we really be that the role of the artist will be rendered redundant by the likes of Midjourney? Despite much angst on social media platforms and the best efforts of certain elements of the media to ramp up anxiety levels, the artists who shared their views for this report were more excited about the potential of AI than resigned to their imminent obsolescence.
Creativity
Nicole Sales, Director of Digital Art at auction house Christie’s, concedes that AI tools will “enable more mediocre art to be created quickly”, but she also believes they will help the best artists create works they would not otherwise be able to do.
“AI equals IA – imagination amplification. It allows me to take my imagination to places I couldn't physically reach,” concurs the artist Daniel Ambrosi, who combines photography and AI to create monumentally detailed, yet subtly surreal, landscape images. “Even if I had the skills, I wouldn’t have the time. My grand-scale works are so intricate, it would take a lifetime to paint them. AI is an enabler.”
This enabling effect has even helped some artists, such as Ellie Pritts who can no longer physically paint due to health issues, continue creating art.
Artist and illustrator George Fox, who has worked on large instillations for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, Wimbledon, Fat Boy Slim and Bremont, admits he was a traditionalist during his early years, focusing on ink and paper, but says augmented reality and latterly AI have allowed his creativity to grow.
“AI is not a threat but an exciting development that offers new opportunities. Rather than being intimidated by this change, we should embrace it as a privilege and opportunity to innovate.
I am not advocating for the abandonment of traditional art forms, quite the opposite. AI has an incredibly exciting role to play alongside traditional methods. It represents the next phase in the evolution of digital art, much like how art appropriation has evolved and been recontextualized throughout history.”
The London-based art-tech pioneers Rob and Nick Carter are also advocates. Having enlisted the help of industrial robots earlier in their careers, they are now using AI to push the boundaries of their creativity ever further.
In one of their latest pieces, the film Chroma-Viscosity II, AI, in combination with highly magnified close-up photography, has allowed the duo to create a stunning and incredibly detailed “fluid, ever-shifting interpretation of the tactile, visceral qualities of paint immersing the viewer in a constantly evolving surface”.
“Our art has always been a fusion of the analogue and digital, drawing from both the past and the future. In this context, incorporating new technology feels like a natural progression for us,” explains Rob.
Desire
Whether the desire to own AI art will be sufficient to support those artists embracing the technology hinges, of course, on the recognition and enthusiasm of collectors and museums. So far, the evidence either way is limited, but for its advocates there are encouraging signs that the medium isn’t heading for an NFT-esque boom-and-bust.
Exhibitions dedicated to AI-generated art remain thin on the ground, but interest from influential museums is growing. In 2016, there were just two shows, according to research by ArtTactic. So far this year there have been eight around the world, including Harold Cohen at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
The volume of AI-generated art sold via auction, however, remains a trickle. At the peak of the market in 2023 only 10 works valued at just over $12 million went under the hammer. But as noted by ArtTactic’s Anders Petterson most sales in such a nascent market are done via galleries or, increasingly, by the artists themselves.
Despite this, Refik Anadol, a Turkish-born artist now living in Los Angeles who uses data-driven, machine-learning algorithms to create large-scale abstract works of art, has seen a number of his works sell for well over a million dollars at auction.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, enthusiasm for AI art varies generationally and between those who consider themselves “collectors” or “enthusiasts”. “Collectors” are defined as those who are investing in artistic mediums whilst art “enthusiasts” are those who are not buying art per se but have an appreciation for art and invest time in it by doing things such as visiting galleries and exhibitions.
A recent survey by ArtTactic asked buyers whether they were excited or concerned by the rapid evolution of AI technology. Just over 70% of “enthusiasts” said they were “very” or “somewhat” excited, but only 33% of “collectors” echoed that sentiment.
Younger “collectors”, however, are more enthusiastic with 44% either “very” or “somewhat” excited, compared with only 23% of those over 55. Although only 3% of “art collectors”, according to the survey results, believe AI-generated art is more important than traditional mediums, the figure jumps to 31% for “art enthusiasts”.
When asked what was driving their reticence, “collectors” said concerns about “authenticity and originality” (61%), closely followed by a “lack of emotional connection”, were the biggest issues for them.
Ownership
Almost 40% of “collectors” listed “copyright infringement” as a purchasing concern, and it is without doubt the issue creating the most consternation among artists.
The concern takes two forms. First, who actually owns the copyright to an AI-generated work of art – the artist, the owner of the platform being used or even the AI itself? And second, what, if any, rights do the artists whose work may have been used to “train” AI image-generating platforms like Midjourney have?
As the courts have, as yet, failed to deliver conclusive verdicts on either, Marine Tanguy, CEO and Founder of MTArt Agency, says artists, especially those whose own influence on the work in question may be less apparent, need to be cautious. “Most AI models do not protect the rights of the artists using them so I would recommend looking at platforms like exactly.ai, which guarantee their rights when training the model.”
Alex Estorick, Editor-in-Chief at Right Click Save, is unequivocal on the latter. “Appropriation has been an essential component of fine art since Duchamp, but it is clearly inappropriate for large multi-national companies to benefit from the creative labour of individual artists without rewarding them.”
Tanguy has other ethical reservations regarding generative art platforms. “AI is filled with biases. If you asked both Open AI and Midjourney to represent a caring person, you would only find images of young women.
“I also worry about the speed with which we will be able to create and consume visuals with this technology. Right now, we are consuming 10,000 visuals every day. The idea of adding any more to this huge number is not bearable for our brains.”
Belonging
Using AI to create art asks more profound questions of us: Can somebody like Jason Allen who punches instructions into a computer really be considered an artist and what of the algorithm that creates the art?
Yes and no, suggests Tanguy: “The commission contracts that Renaissance painters would receive to create altarpieces for various patrons and churches are very similar to the prompts we write when using AI models like Gemini, Open AI and Midjourney to create visuals.
“There lies the big question: is the authenticity in the execution or the vision? I tend to argue for the artistic vision as I believe that in a world of tools, it's our creative input and the emotions we convey with it that makes us human.”
The human element remains central, agrees Nick Carter. “The machine is simply a tool that helps execute the artist's vision. We are involved at every stage, from conception to final execution, so the creative control always lies within the artist’s hands.”
While the Carters are clear that technology remains subservient to them, Daniel Ambrosi has a more nuanced view of the role that the highly customised and unique version of Google’s Deep Dream image recognition platform, which he uses to create his masterpieces, plays.
“It’s just a tool, but it feels like a partner. It surprises and delights me consistently. It’s a clean example of a human-AI hybrid art form, about 50-50. I fully prepare my panoramic photograph, get it to exactly where I want it, and then hand it over to Deep Dream to see how the AI sees the world.”
Writing in the Royal Academy of Art’s 2024 Spring magazine, Charlotte Appleyard, the organisation’s Director of Development and Business Innovation, believes art is an emotional, as well as a visual, experience that computers cannot mimic.
“We have a profound intuition that art is a connection between one human and another. It binds us together – either one-to-one with the artist or one-to-many in life. True creativity can only be human.”
Dude, art is not dead
Sifting through the evidence above, it seems safe to conclude that, contrary to the first words of this article, art is alive and kicking. As George Fox succinctly puts it. “This is not the end of art; it is simply a new chapter.”
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