Is AI the future of art?

Argentinian artist Sofia Crespo is one of the pioneers of the "AI visual arts" movement, where humans create rules for computers, then use algorithms to generate drawings, ideas and new model.

Sofia Crespo poses with one of her "AI creations" on June 8, 2022.

The field has begun to attract great interest from art collectors and even fetches high prices in auctions.

In March this year, 22-year-old American artist and programmer Robbie Barrat sold a work called "Nude Portrait#7Frame#64" - created with the help of AI - for £630,000, equivalent to $821,000, on Sotheby's auction floor.

Nearly four years ago at an auction organized by Christie's, the French Society of Obvious - which includes artists working with artificial intelligence - also sold a work titled "Edmond de Belamy" for 432,500 USD.

The AI ​​work "Edmond de Belamy" fetched up to 432,500 USD in an auction 4 years ago.

These early acquisitions are laying the groundwork for a major turning point, as more and more tech companies start releasing AI tools that can generate lifelike photos in seconds.

Collector Jason Bailey told AFP that synthetic art based on artificial intelligence "is like a ballet between man and machine".

Since the 1960s, artists in Germany and the United States have left their artistic imprints on computers. The V&A Museum in London still houses a collection dating back more than half a century, including a standout 1968 work titled "Plastik 1" by German artist Georg Nees.

Nees used computer randomization (RNG) to create the geometric design for his sculpture.

Today, digital artists are working with supercomputers and creative adversarial networks (GANs) to create images far more complex than anything Nees could have dreamed of.

A GAN is a collection of competitive AIs, where one AI creates an image from the instructions it is given, and the other acts as a "gatekeeper", assessing whether the output is correct or not. are not. If it detects an error, it will resend the image for editing, and the first AI will be back up for a moment, trying to beat the competitive AI.

Crespo believes that AI-equipped machines cannot replace humans in art.

Even so, artists like Crespo and Barrat emphasize that people remain at the center of the process, even if their working methods are not traditional.

"When I work this way, I'm not creating images. I'm creating a system that can generate images," explains Barrat.

Crespo used to think his AI machine was a real "collaborator", but in reality, it was difficult to achieve "even a single line of code" to produce the desired results.

Today, big tech companies like Google and Open AI are both touting the value of new tools that they say will bring realism and creativity without coding skills.

They have replaced GANs with more user-friendly AI models called "transformers" with the ability to convert everyday speech into images.

The Google Images website is filled with creative images, created by tutorials like: "A little cactus in a straw hat and sunglasses in the Sahara Desert".

Open AI boasts that its Dalle-2 engine can produce any scenario in any art style, from ancient Flemish masters to renowned contemporary artist Andy Warhol.

Although the emergence of AI has caused many people to be replaced by machines in many areas such as customer care, artists see the explosion of artificial intelligence as an opportunity rather than a threat. .

Crespo tried out Dalle-2 and called it a "new level of visual generation in general", although she prefers her GAN.

"I usually don't need a very precise model to create my work, because I love when things look a bit out of place and unrecognizable," Crespo says.

Artist Camille Lenglois from Paris' Center Pompidou - Europe's largest collection of contemporary art - also dismisses any suggestion that artists are about to be replaced by machines. She emphasized that machines do not yet have "the ability to create and to criticize", and that "the ability to create realistic images does not make someone an artist."