Not long after the Sony World Photography Award Creative Category winner was announced last year, the victor came clean with a surprising revelation. German photographer Boris Eldagsen admitted that his first prize-winning photograph ‘The Electrician’ was actually an AI-generated image. Eldagsen had created the image using the popular AI-image creating tool DALL-E 2. He turned down the prize, citing his motivation for entering to see if “competitions are prepared for AI images. They are not.”
A year on from his famous refusal, the Palmer Gallery in London is hosting an exhibition of his and other artists’ works to demonstrate the ways art and AI are being used together.
‘Post-Photography: The Uncanny Valley’ features the works of Eldagsen alongside artists Nouf Aljowaysir and Ben Millar Cole. Eldagsen is exhibiting ‘The Electrician’ as part of a series of photography works that blend natural imagery with the synthetic.
Saudi-born and New York-based artist and design technologist Aljowaysir has examined the biases in AI-image creation in her work Ana Min Wein: Where am I from?, to recover her Saudi Arabian and Iraqi lineage from more the stereotypes AI tools rely upon. British artist Millar Cole’s work toys with the now-publicly understood telltale signs of AI-doctored images and blurs that line with more sophisticated imagery, to create an uncannily off image.
“The artists in the exhibition engage with the current possibilities of creative collaboration with AI tools, harnessing the unique affordances brought on by the various technologies, whilst thinking about their implications,” says AI-art curator Luba Elliott. “Image recognition tools highlight the imperfection of the machine gaze, whereas photorealistic text-to-image models focus on portraying our collective imagination down to the smallest detail, with the prompt engineer at the steering wheel – taking the viewer to the next stage of art history,” Elliott continues.
The term “uncanny valley” was first invented in 1970 by Japanese robotics professor Masahiro Mori. He described it as the way that humans will increasingly empathise with anthropomorphous-robots until a threshold when they become too humanlike and we find them unsettling.
As a concept, the uncanny was popularised by psychologists Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud in their description of how familiar things can become strange when they present themselves as a facsimile of another part of ordinary life – they used dolls as a primary example.
While the Palmer Gallery is embracing a dialogue between AI and contemporary artists, other artists have been less willing to engage with the controversial technology.
