Ex MACHINA

As the use of artificial intelligence in art generates increasing debate, two artists who have made use of the emerging technology weigh in on the ethical questions that have emerged.

- JESSLYN LYE

It’s not hard to understand why artists are concerned about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in art. At Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition in 2022, a prize was awarded to an artwork that was, unbeknown to the judges, generated by AI. This year, a class action lawsuit has been filed against a trio of AI text-to-image generators, alleging that the data sets used to train the platforms’ algorithms made use of billions of copyrighted images without compensation or consent from the artists.

For artists, seeing a computer imitate and manipulate work intrinsically tied to their identity can be devastating. Some even wonder if jobs that would have gone to them might start going to machines instead. To Singaporean artist Jo Ho, however, AI is just another tool.

Shiny new tools

In her artistic practice, Ho experiments with emerging digital technologies— including the use of AI—to create works that examine the future of digital interactions between us and our environment. She points out that the use of AI in art is more established than most might imagine. “AI has already been prevalent in the tools artists and designers use in our software, such as Content-Aware Fill in Adobe Photoshop. In its current state, AI is just another tool that belongs to the wider sphere of generative art. Although generative art has been around for more than a century (think of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘3 Standard Stoppages’ in 1914), the idea of generative approaches in art using computer algorithms is relatively new.”

Rather than shunning the technology, she believes that it is important to continually question the way these tools get developed, the types of people developing them and the specific ways in which they are being used.