AI as other: An art-as-research approach to generative AI art practice

In ICCC 2023 Conference Proceedings (University of Waterloo, Ontario, June 19–23, 2023).

Choi, SK., & DiPaola, S. (In press). AI as other: An art-as-research approach to generative AI art practice. ICCC 2023 Conference Proceedings. https://computationalcreativity.net/iccc23/papers/ICCC-2023_paper_109.pdf

ABSTRACT 

This Art-as-Research explores emergent processes that develop between creative practitioners and artificially intelligent (AI) technology when an AI system is positioned as ontological other that an artist works with to produce an image. The authors, as artists and early adopters of AI image synthesis, create aesthetic artefacts and investigate the artistic process used to visualize and conceptualize creative praxis in this new media, critically examining how generative AI systems impinge on and enhance creative freedom, mediating the essential relation between self and practice. This process dynamic is employed as a phenomenological probe into AI generative art. The authors examine how artistic intention is reshaped by algorithmic transformation and re-presentation to question what is preserved, nurtured, lost, or irrevocably altered in the interplay of the autographic and the algorithmic. The study finds that neural media, as the authors term it, is a reflection of the ambiguous mediation of input and redirection of intention, motivating an anticipatory aesthetics. The non-deterministic processes in generative AI systems create an external perturbation of the artist’s innate expression of the mental image. This disruption provides an ambiguous computational “other” in the artist’s practice environment, expanding the field of interactive potentiality and augmenting embodied intentionality.