Arts
AI art
How New Tools Redefine What Art Is
Also known as AI art, AIart, AI-generated art, A.I.-Generated Artwork
Every time a new tool arrives — the camera, cinema, digital editing, now generative AI — it reopens the oldest arguments: who is the real author, what counts as original, and is this even art? Painters once feared photography would end painting; today artists ask the same about AI. It links to scientific instruments, since a camera or scanner is a measuring device pointed at the world. It connects to philosophy, because our tools reshape how we think and see, to law, which scrambles to answer who owns AI-made work, and to machine learning, the math of learning from mountains of data that powers today's art tools.
Key people
- Erwan SoumhiFrench conceptual artist, film director and AI visual anthropologist
- Matthieu CrimersmoisInterdisciplinary artist working across sound, drawing and performance
Timeline
- 1800Creative automatons have flourished throughout history, such as Maillardet's automaton, created around 1800 and capable of creating multiple drawings and poems.
- 1950The field of artificial intelligence was founded in the 1950s, and artists began to create art with artificial intelligence shortly after the discipline's founding.
- 1973From 1973 to 1975, Cohen refined AARON during a residency at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University.
- 1980Karl Sims has exhibited art created with artificial life since the 1980s.
- 1992In both 1991 and 1992, Sims won the Golden Nica award at Prix Ars Electronica for his videos using artificial evolution.
Read
- Ars AmatoriaOvid · 1494Book
- The art of happinessHis Holiness Tenzin Gyatso the XIV Dalai Lama · 1998Book
- Living, loving & learningLeo F. Buscaglia · 1982Book
- The Creativity CodeMarcus du Sautoy · 2019Book
Listen
- Deep Dive - Art & AiPromptARTPodcast
- AI ARTIST TODAYMars EvePodcast
- Art & Artist - Human Creativity in the Age of AIKyle Ariel KnowlesPodcast
- Art of AIDoug KarrPodcast
Voices to follow
- Trace NicholsYouTubeAmerican visual artist, photographer, and educator
- Emanuel GollobYouTubeAustrian artist and researcher
- Erwan Soumhi@ErwanSoumhi · XFrench conceptual artist, film director and AI visual anthropologist
Debates
- Is AI-generated art truly 'art'?One view: Yes, because human intention, curation, and iterative prompting guide the AI's output, making it a tool for creative expression. · Another: No, because art requires human emotion, consciousness, and direct physical or conceptual creation, which an algorithm cannot possess.Open question
- Should AI-generated art be eligible for copyright?One view: Yes, the human who crafted the prompt, curated the results, or significantly edited the output should hold the copyright. · Another: No, because copyright law traditionally protects human-created works, and an AI is merely a tool, not a creator.Open question
- Does AI art threaten the livelihoods of human artists?One view: Yes, as AI tools become more sophisticated, they may automate tasks traditionally done by human artists, potentially reducing demand. · Another: No, AI art offers new tools and creative avenues for artists, allowing them to innovate and expand their practice rather than replacing them.Open question
Glossary
- Generative AIArtificial intelligence that can create new content, such as images, text, or music, from learned patterns.
- Prompt engineeringThe skill of crafting precise and effective text instructions to guide an AI model to produce desired outputs.
- Diffusion modelA type of generative AI that creates images by iteratively refining a noisy image until it matches a given prompt.
- Neural networkA computing system inspired by the human brain's structure, used for machine learning tasks like image recognition and generation.
- DatasetA large collection of organized information, typically images and text, used to train AI models.
Careers
Roles this can lead toward
Threads 4
Where this connects to other fields — and why it's worth knowing.
- Scientific Instruments & Measurement Science
For thousands of years painters drew galloping horses wrong, legs stretched out like a rocking horse, because the human eye can't freeze a fast blur. Then Muybridge's high-speed camera caught the truth: mid-gallop, all four hooves leave the ground tucked underneath. The machine saw what no artist could, and corrected the art.
- Philosophy of Technology Philosophy
When cameras arrived, painters stopped needing to copy reality, so they went wild with abstract art. When film arrived, it freed photography to become its own art form. Each new image tool quietly demotes the older one to 'just craft' and reveals what it was really for all along. New tools don't just add options, they rewrite the meaning of the art that came before.
- AI & Technology Regulation Law
The fight over whether AI can make art you're allowed to own sounds brand new, but it's a rerun. Back in 1884, courts had to decide whether a photograph, made by a machine, could count as real, ownable art, and photography won. That 140-year-old ruling is now being aimed straight at AI image generators. The law's been here before.
- The Math Behind Machine Learning Mathematics
When an AI 'invents' a new image, it's really wandering through a giant map of everything it has already seen, picking a spot between familiar points, half-cat, half-cloud. Its 'creativity' is geometry: a stroll across a squished-down atlas of past pictures. The surprise is real, but it's blended from old ingredients, not conjured from nothing.