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“László Moholy-Nagy telephoned instructions to a factory in the 1920s to produce images without the need to be on-site to direct production.”
– Artist George Legrady, reaching back to the Bauhaus to locate an early precedent for AI-generated imagery. Taking stock of his ongoing experimentation with MidJourney and Stable Diffusion, Legrady explores the aesthetic and critical concerns around prompt-based art.
“It might be best understood not as incriminating some of the 20th century’s most iconic artworks, but as defending against a future where all authorship is swallowed by the digestive system of a quasi-sentient reproduction machine.”
– Writer Sam Venis, defending the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling against Andy Warhol’s Prince silkscreens (photographer Lynn Goldsmith, whose work they are based on, had sued the Warhol Foundation) as a much-needed precedent for protecting creators against generative AI platforms’ insatiable appetite for training data

Danish interaction designer Bjørn Karmann premieres Paragraphica (2023), a camera that ‘captures’ images with location data (address, weather, time of day, etc.) and AI. Three dials control the data and Stable Diffusion parameters while the viewfinder displays a real-time text description of the place you’re at. Upon pressing the trigger, the AI will generate a ‘photo’ from that prompt. The project exists both as a physical, star-nosed mole-inspired prototype and a virtual camera for you to try.

“Americans don’t need AI generated images to imagine they’re being overrun by immigrants and that their cities have devolved into anarchy, just like they don’t need deepfakes to believe lies about Nancy Pelosi.”
Motherboard’s Emanuel Maiberg, on the Republican Party turning to cutting edge technology to tell age-old lies. In a new political ad, RNC staffers used AI-generated imagery to fear-monger about “China invading Taiwan, massive waves of immigration at the United States’ border with Mexico, and the total collapse of civilization in San Francisco,” if Biden wins another term.
“No, these renderings do not relate to reality. They relate to the totality of crap online. So that’s basically their field of reference, right? Just scrape everything online and that’s your new reality.”
– German media artist Hito Steyerl, when asked how connected images—“statistical renderings” in her parlance—generated by AI platforms like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are with reality.
“We are thrilled to announce that our campaign to gather artist opt outs has resulted in 78 million artworks being opted out of AI training.”
– AI artist-activist group Spawning, on the success of haveibeentrained.com, a tool that allows artists to search for their works in the Stable Diffusion training set and exclude them from further use. “This establishes a significant precedent towards realizing our vision of consenting AI,” write Spawning founders Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon.
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Peter Wu+’s EPOCH opens “XENOSPACE,” an experimental virtual exhibition showcasing the “expansive collaborative potential of AI and machine learning.” Set in the 360-degree panorama of a Stable Diffusion generated server room, seven ‘site-specific’ artworks by Connie Bakshi, Ana María Caballero, CROSSLUCID, Libby Heaney, Harvey Moon, and others await exploration. “As viewers navigate the installations, they will experience a disorienting and uncanny repetition that challenges their familiar frame of reference,” notes ChatGPT.

Billed as the first show conceived entirely with ChatGPT, Jonas Lund’s “In the Middle of Nowhere” opens at Office Impart, Berlin. The Swedish conceptual artist presents a series of new works—videos, tapestries, software—that emerged from lengthy conversations with the OpenAI chatbot. In The Fat Cats of The Art World (2023, right), for example, Lund pokes fun at shifting power dynamics, whereas the video piece The End (2023, left) rolls the credits for human-created art history.

For Quanta, science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy traces the backstory of AI image generation. In his telling, a probabilistic model (image) proposed in a 2015 paper by Jascha Sohl-Dickstein set the stage for a subsequent denoising technique now used in DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and other models. The technique reconciles the gap between generated images and training images, helping generative models provide lucid responses to whimsical prompts like “goldfish slurping Coca-Cola on a beach.”

“We were each fighting a version of ourself that looked similar but that was uncanny, twisted in a way to which we didn’t consent.”
– Cartoonist Sarah Andersen, on the similarities between troll- and AI-generated “shadow selves.” First, the alt-right hijacked Anderson’s work to spread neo-Nazi ideology, then Stable Diffusion allowed for easy imitation of her and concept artist Greg Rutkowski’s distinct styles.
“The only thing that Stability AI can do is algorithmic disgorgement, where they completely destroy their database and all models that have our data in it.”
Concept Art Association board member Karla Ortiz, dismissing the fact that the next version of image generating learning model Stable Diffusion will allow artists to opt-out of their artwork being used as training data
“It’s been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won’t be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art.”
– Polish fantasy illustrator Greg Rutkowski, on being drowned out by AI derivatives. According to Lexica, Rutkowski’s name has been used as an image-generator prompt 93,000 times on Stability.AI’s Stable Diffusion platform—a total that eclipses Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci by an order of magnitude.
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