An MIT panel charts how artificial intelligence will impact art and design.
Few technologies have shown as much potential to shape our future as artificial intelligence. Specialists in fields ranging from medicine to microfinance to the military are evaluating AI tools, exploring how these might transform their work and worlds. For creative professionals, AI poses a unique set of challenges and opportunities — particularly generative AI, the use of algorithms to transform vast amounts of data into new content.
The future of generative AI and its impact on art and design was the subject of a sold-out panel discussion on Oct. 26 at the MIT Bartos Theater. It was part of the annual meeting for the Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT), a group of alumni and other supporters of the arts at MIT, and was co-presented by the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST), a cross-school initiative for artist residencies and cross-disciplinary projects.
Introduced by Andrea Volpe, director of CAMIT, and moderated by Onur Yüce Gün SM ’06, PhD’16, the panel featured multimedia artist and social science researcher Ziv Epstein SM’19, PhD’23, MIT professor of architecture and director of the SMArchS and SMArchS AD programs Ana Miljački, and artist and roboticist Alex Reben MAS ’10.
The discussion centered around three themes: emergence, embodiment, and expectations:
Emergence
Moderator Onur Yüce Gün: In much of your work, what emerges is usually a question — an ambiguity — and that ambiguity is inherent in the creative process in art and design. Does generative AI help you reach those ambiguities?
Ana Miljački: In the summer of 2022, the Memorial Cemetery in Mostar [in Bosnia and Herzegovina] was destroyed. It was a post-World War II Yugoslav memorial, and we wanted to figure out a way to uphold the values the memorial had stood for. We compiled video material from six different monuments and, with AI, created a nonlinear documentary, a triptych playing on three video screens, accompanied by a soundscape. With this project we fabricated a synthetic memory, a way to seed those memories and values into the minds of people who never lived those memories or values. This is the type of ambiguity that would be problematic in science, and one that is fascinating for artists and designers and architects. It is also a bit scary.
Ziv Epstein: There is some debate whether generative AI is a tool or an agent. But even if we call it a tool, we need to remember that tools are not neutral. Think about photography. When photography emerged, a lot of painters were worried that it meant the end of art. But it turned out that photography freed up painters to do other things. Generative AI is, of course, a different type of tool because it draws on a huge quantity of other people’s work. There is already artistic and creative agency embedded in these systems. There are already ambiguities in how these existing works will be represented, and which cycles and ambiguities we will perpetuate.
Alex Reben: I’m often asked whether these systems are actually creative, in the way that we are creative. In my own experience, I’ve often been surprised at the outputs I create using AI. I see that I can steer things in a direction that parallels what I might have done on my own but is different enough from what I might have done, is amplified or altered or changed. So there are ambiguities. But we need to remember that the term AI is also ambiguous. It’s actually many different things.
Source: MIT
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