Could thoughtful 'AI art' counter the rise of 'AI slop'? Why creatives today face a paradox

edited by Swati Mestri, reviewed by Andrew Zinin

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Add to Preferred Sources Credit: The Conversation 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 multichannel 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 a dystopian Seoul besieged by an artificial intelligence that drives them to compete with one another, monitors their labor 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 labor. But Kim'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 infrastructure governs our everyday lives: It is used in warfare, drives our social feeds, analyzes our facial expressions and pilfers the data we upload for harvesting by a handful of tech companies that profit from our cloud capital.

Our data feeds the datasets of commercial generative AI platforms, which saturate 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 with an artist choosing to work with the technology.

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: 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 labor and even what it means to be human.

Art institutions worldwide are increasingly focusing on the impact of AI on art and creativity.

Some of these works are heavily critical of AI's extractive nature.

But art institutions are reliant on corporate sponsorship, visitor engagement and media metrics to secure funding. An artist's political critique can also become a marketing tool, an icon or a hero image.

Kim's generative AI poster, taken out of context, is a reminder of this predicament.

Theorist Victor Burgin is suspicious of the role of art galleries in offering a critique of AI. He says art that is critical of AI requires a backstory that cannot be conveyed simply by looking at the work itself.

For Burgin, art's resistance lies elsewhere, in resisting stereotype, cliche and the ideas ingrained in popular visual culture.

As people become more distrustful of AI replacing artistic labor, and with AI encroaching on many facets of the creative industries, it is imperative we have conversations about what artistic experimentation with AI can offer.

As a creative researcher, I am interested in the way my encounter with a technology shapes my capacity to know it. As a photographer, I think about generative AI as a technology that evolved from the datasets of the world's photographs. This also means generative AI inherits photographic ways of seeing and remembering the world.

Generative AI taps into users' desire to visualize anything—from nudes to Hollywood stars to seeing the dead live again.

By the time text-to-image platforms arrived in 2021–22, this desire could be realized with as little as a linguistic prompt.

That is the marketing rhetoric, and it led me to create a work about an event that was fundamentally impossible to see: my mother before she became my mother.

I wanted to know whether the billions of pilfered images could produce a single image of my mother.

Given the prompt, the exercise was designed to fail. I didn't want to resolve that paradox, but to use the problem as a way of considering the connections between visual language and image labels embedded in AI systems.

Since making that work, I have grappled with the ethical implications of using generative AI as an artist. AI slop is one facet of my hesitation; the politics of opting out is another. And I keep asking myself, is there a space for the creative practice of art to help us understand and think about AI systems?

A creative practice with generative AI begins by repurposing its systems and working against what they are optimized to do. It means embracing what AI fails to capture and working against its logic. This can include prompting for aspects of social life that resist measure or algorithmic aggregation, such as affects and sensations.

Artistic experimentation, in this instance, may be one of the few places where we can encounter the limits of AI's insidious encroachment.

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space. Full profile →

Master's in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X's editorial success. Full profile →

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.