AI Art: How artists are using and confronting machine learning

Artists are increasingly using AI to create art that raises important questions about technology and humanity.

According to Michelle Kuo, there is little understanding about AI, even though many things we interact with daily are powered by it. Some artists use AI as a tool, while others want people to understand more about it. Many people feel captive or passive to the technologies that are simply given to us. However, artists are taking the initiative to intervene in these processes by asking existential questions about free will, human will, and machine will, as well as questions about perception.

They are exploring how we can see things that are not made for us to see by taking a tool that exists in the world and making it do something it's not supposed to do.

Refik Anadol’s current exhibition at MoMA, called "Unsupervised," is an example of using unsupervised learning to create art. The exhibition uses the metadata of MoMA's archives to create custom software artwork that interprets and transforms the museum's collection data. The machine learning model has built an incredibly complex classification system of MoMA's collection, and is now navigating through the empty space to create speculative and hypothetical "dreams." These dreams are not based on our value system or points of reference, but rather the machine learning model is peering into another type of mind.

Kate Crawford believes that we are at a crucial inflection point, a moment where everything from illustration to film directing to publishing is about to change rapidly. However, we should keep in mind that AI systems are not scientifically objective, and are skewed from the beginning by the data that they're trained on.

Trevor Paglen is interested in AI as a set of technical systems that can provide insight into the ways in which we can understand and interpret the world. The intersection of art and AI is a space where we can reflect on the relationship between technology and humanity, and the ways in which the two can work together to create something new and innovative.