An Artist in Residence on the territory of AI
At a reception for OpenAI’s first developer conference last month in San Francisco, a crowd mingled with wine in hand as scathing criticism of art made with artificial intelligence flashed on a blue wall at the front of the room. “I’ve seen more compelling art from a broken printer,” said one critic. “The sophisticated equivalent of elevator music,” snarled another. “Harmless, unmemorable and terminally boring.”
It may seem like a strange strategy for OpenAI, the company behind widely used generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, to promote disdain for AI art, until you understand the twist: AI itself wrote the criticism. Alexander Rebenthe MIT-trained artist behind the presentation, combined his own custom code with GPT-4, a version of the large language model that powers the online chatbot ChatGPT.
Next month, 38-year-old Mr. Reben will become OpenAI’s first artist in residence. He intervenes as generative AI evolves at a dizzying pace, with artists and writers trying to understand its possibilities and evolving implications. Some see artificial intelligence as a powerful and innovative tool that can take them in strange and wonderful directions. Others express outrage that AI is scraping their work from the internet to train systems without permission, compensation, or credit.
A group of visual artists will come at the end of November filed an amended copyright lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and other makers of AI tools after a federal judge dismissed parts of the original complaint, which accused the companies of misusing the artists’ creations to train generative AI systems. Mr Reben said he could not comment on the specifics of AI and the law, “but as with any new creative technology, the law must catch up to the unpredictable future.”
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday for copyright infringement.)
Tech companies included Googling, Autodesk and Microsoft have welcomed artists in residence. And in recent years, artists have tested products like GPT and the DALL-E image generator, providing insight into the tools’ creative potential before their public release. But the OpenAI residency, which gives Mr Reben a front-row view of the company’s work, is a first for the start-up at the center of the art and AI debate.
“Alex is one of the first people we share our new models with,” said Natalie Summers, OpenAI spokeswoman.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has long recognized that the technologies created by his company will change the nature of art. But he emphasizes that no matter how good the technology becomes, artists – human artists – will always matter.
“There was a real moment of fear where people asked, ‘Is this an instrument we built or a creature we built?’” he said last month during a performance before more than 300 artists and art lovers packed into an abandoned building. warehouse in downtown Oakland, California. “People now look at these things as a new set of tools.”
After digital artist Android Jones said at the event that many artists were still very angry about the rise of AI image generators and the way they reduced the value of their own art, Mr Altman said people would always look for art made by other people.
“There will clearly be more competition,” he says. “But, awash in a sea of AI-generated art, that desire for human connection will rise, not fall.”
Ge Wang, an associate director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and an associate professor of music and computer science at the school’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, wonders how receptive OpenAI will be to considering the tricky questions about the impact of AI on art. What is the right balance between machine output and human management? Will the immediate results of DALL-E, for example, prevent people from developing skills that require study and time?
“Asking these questions is quite bad for business, and OpenAI is a business,” said Dr. Cheek. “Maybe you have a great artist there who asks questions. Are you willing to receive them?”
Still, Dr. Wang — who is also a musician and designed two music-making apps, Ocarina and Magic Piano, for Apple’s iPhone — said he was encouraged that Mr. Reben was open to questions about AI’s impact on the arts community . .
Mr. Reben said that as a technologist who had studied the impact of innovations such as photography and recorded music on creativity, “I tend to stay on the cautiously optimistic side.”
“But like any other technology from the past, there are both sides to the coin,” he added.
The New York native moved to Berkeley, California, a decade ago to become director of technology and research at Stochastic laboratories, a breeding ground for creative scientists and engineers housed in a three-storey 19th century Victorian building. Mr. Reben’s highly conceptual art adorns the walls of the main hallway, filling workspaces packed with printers, headphones, cables, capacitors, soldering supplies and other supplies.
On a rainy Thursday, Mr. Reben relaxed on a couch at Stochastic after a meeting at OpenAI to elaborate on what he will do during the residency, which will last three months.
“If I come out and make my art better, or even come up with new questions or new directions to present to the world, that would be very valuable,” said Mr. Reben, who has researched the symbiosis between humans and machines. graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, an interdisciplinary research center.
The residency overlaps with Mr.’s first major retrospective. Reben, titled “AI Am I?” and on view through April at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. DALL-E and other image generators such as Halfway through the journey and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion have captivated the internet by allowing anyone to instantly retrieve customized visual images by simply typing a few words into a box. But while much AI-generated art consists of pixels, Mr. Reben often manifests physical structures based on ideas he hones with the help of artificial intelligence.
“I like a lot of absurdity and humor in my work, even when the underlying question is serious,” Mr. Reben said.
One sculpture in the exhibition depicts six toilet plungers lining up in a bizarre police formation. AI-generated text on the whiteboard on the wall explains that the work represents all that remains of the Plungers, an apocryphal art collective from the 1970s. The fake artists adhered to “plungism,” a fictional philosophy “in which an artist’s mind is in motion and can be influenced by anything, even plungers.”
Plungism arose from Mr. Reben’s extensive back-and-forth with GPT-3: He entered a prompt (an input aimed at producing a desired answer) and then tinkered with his favorite answers, sometimes using the edited language fed back to the AI until he landed on exactly the right wording.
Then there’s “Dreams of the Cheese-Faced Gentleman,” which depicts a man whose face could be mistaken for a wheel of Swiss cheese. Mr. Reben worked with GPT-4 to find the right clues to create a compelling description of a painting, then entered the composed text into an image generator. Because he is not a painter himself, he commissioned one to create the artwork.
A large language model that could record both images and text then studied the painting and described it in a language that would fit in any museum. “The combination of psychedelic surrealism and whimsicality gives the painting a playful atmosphere and challenges the viewer to engage with the complex layers of meaning of the work,” says the wall label.
Janisy Lagrue, the AI-created name for the real painter who produced the oil on canvas, explained: “I use cheese because it is such a perfect symbol of the American dream. Cheese is a commodity, not a food. It’s totally artificial and it’s delicious.”
The exhibition raises more questions than answers, reflecting Mr. Reben’s belief that as machines produce better results, people must ask better questions — including about bias and ownership.
“Given how young this creative tool is, there is still a lot to be solved, and addressing these issues falls on the shoulders of everyone involved, from the developers to the users,” said Mr. Reben. “The more people think about these questions, the better.”
Mr. Reben does not claim to speak for all artists as OpenAI’s first artist in residence. But he understands their concerns. Artists and writers worry that AI could steal their jobs, but Dr. Stanford’s Wang said the nervousness extended beyond the possibility of lost livelihoods.
The fear is “not only that we will be replaced as artists, but also that we will be replaced by something much more generic and much less interesting,” he said. “Maybe generic is enough to make a lot of money.”
Cade Metz reporting contributed.