Ever since ChatGPT was released in 2022, businesses and governments have been trying to figure out how artificial intelligence will work alongside humans. Can the technology take on entire jobs? Is it a collaborator? And which functions could A.I. augment rather than replace?
For clues on the future, DealBook visited two art galleries in London featuring works created by traditional artists experimenting with A.I.
In “AI & Technology Influence on Contemporary Art,” a show curated by Virginia Damtsa and on display through Sept. 10 at Gabriel Scott, three painters have used the tech to test the boundaries of human creativity, exploring whether A.I. is a liberating tool or an existential risk to creativity. Jonathan Yeo — whose painting of King Charles III, the first since he was crowned, will be unveiled this month — asked an A.I. to create a series of self-portraits. Von Wolfe, an oil painter, built his own A.I. to create an image of a digital sculpture that is displayed in a light box. And Henry Hudson asked an A.I. to create an image and then used oils to paint a version of it.
“Post-Photography: The Uncanny Valley,” a show at the Palmer Gallery through May 17, also features the work of three artists. Boris Eldagsen of Germany won a Sony World Photographer Award last year — and turned it down, after revealing that he had used A.I. to create his entry partly to kick-start a discussion about technology and art. The image, “The Electrician,” and other works by Eldagsen are displayed alongside images by Ben Millar Cole, a British photographer, and Nouf Aljowaysir, a Saudi-born artist. It would be impossible for most viewers to know that the images were generated using tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. The artists created the works by using A.I. as a tool, as if it were a paintbrush or a computer. For workers trying to understand how their own jobs will evolve, that could provide some hope that humans will have a role to play for a bit longer yet.
