When Is an AI Image Truly Art?

Pictures created from artificial intelligence are now leaking to ads, social media, entertainment and more, thanks to models such as Midjourney and Dall-E. But the creation of visual art with artificial intelligence is due to decades.

Christian Paul Curats Art Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City. Last year, under the auspices of Paul exhibition British artist Harold Cohen and the computer program for Aaron must the first Amnesty International Program for Art Construction. Unlike the statistical models today, Harun was created in the 1970s as Expert systemSimulating decision -making by a human artist.

IEEE SICTRUM He talked to Paul about the famous Cohen Program, Curation Digital Art, and the relationship between art and technology.

How do you sponsor digital art?

Christian Ball: Digital art coordination is not different from any other art form. Whether the paint, photography, or printing, all of them look at the development of the concept and how it is translated into an intermediary. So my musical choices are not driven by technology. If you are trustee, the choice of work in the exhibition will not be driven by a specific paint or technique for a stroke.

In 2001, Harold Cohen Harun Cat produced as part of his experiences in producing characters with the artificial intelligence model. Cohen taught the model how to deal with the intertwined organisms in composition, which he did by making the model fill the objects from the introduction to the background.Whitney Museum of American Art

However, of course, there were offers about Pointillism as a specific technique in drawing. There can be an exhibition that focuses on artificial intelligence techniques as an artistic means. But general standards will remain the development and implementation of the concept.

Do you cooperate with engineers as part of your work?

pee: Yes, of course. Many artists also have a background in engineering, especially when it comes to the older generation of digital artists. When there is no digital artistic or school programs, digital artists often have Engineering background Or programming. So you work with developers and software engineers, and many artists are programmers or programmers themselves – I would like to say most of the artists I work with. Sometimes they have to use external sources, only because of the amount of work, but most of them are also very deep in weeds.

What are the challenges of collecting and preserving digital art?

pee: For technical or university institutions, it is important that you have standards and best practices to archive and track technologies, because computers and systems change at a rapid pace. In the nineties of the last century, people began to pay more attention to the implementation of memorization curricula, and there are many strategies. One of them is storage and preservation of devices. This is used for pieces that depend on a conceptual point of view. Then there is migration, fun and re -creation.

There is no silver bullet. One has to look at the individual artwork to know which approach may be the best. At the Harold Cohen exhibition, for example, we re -created one of the previous pieces of scratch based on Cohen’s books and the printed symbol that we found, and his son re -coded it already in Bithon. The original basic was rebuilt, but then it was re -coded in Bethon.

What inspired the Cohen exhibition?

pee: I knew Harold Cohen for some time. We worked together in an exhibition in 2007, and Aaron is a creative work. Every person studying digital art knows this as one of the basic pieces.

We brought some of his works to the Whitney Museum group, so it was one point. But I also believed that it would be particularly interesting to reconsider the first AI to make art in light of the text models to the current image. Their operations are radically different, composing and cooperating in a completely different way.

Harold Cohen Harun wrote from scratch. He was completely responsible for the construction of this program, which developed through five different languages ​​over his life, and therefore the formation of the image was completely under his control. He moved from exciting shapes, to a pictorial stage, to a vegetarian stage, and then returned to abstraction. Later in life, he taught the formation of the colors of the programs, and also built drawing devices that would carry out Harun’s works. Harun was truly considered collaborative, and Harun’s packaging is the sensitivity of Cohen and aesthetics.

AI is based on today statistically, a lot of composition and agency occurs in the black box of companies. The artist has no control over that, even if the artists have trained and their own models. Artists who work with artificial intelligence are very invested in addressing the program and working with it, but there is always a component created by the unimportant companies.

Could the images create from artificial intelligence be an art?

pee: Not all of the pictures created by text models to an image are art. It is great for people to be able Use Amnesty International to create photos He played with her, but I will not call this final art.

AI ART uses artificial intelligence as a tool and medium in a concept and practical way, and sharing and questioning those technologies, whether it is from moral Or aesthetic perspective. Most artificial intelligence artists participate today with these techniques in a very deep way. They collect their training data sets. They train models. They wonder about the biases included in artificial intelligence. So it is a complex and sharing process, and it is not just a text wave that generates an image.

This article appears in the May 2025 case as “5 questions for Christian Paul”.