Art and artificial intelligence

What does the pairing of art and artificial intelligence mean?

It covers everything in which artificial intelligence enters the making or study of art — computer systems that learn from data and can themselves generate images, shapes or texts. This is no marginal curiosity but one of the key topics of today's market. And as tends to happen with new things, it brings as many questions as it does enthusiasm.

How exactly does AI enter the art world?

It reaches it from three sides at once. It serves as a tool for making art — a work by the humanoid robot Ai-Da was auctioned for more than a million dollars, and the artist Refik Anadol has long worked with AI; as an aid in studying and verifying the authenticity of works (Art Recognition, for example, is moving in this direction); and finally as a question in its own right.

What is the difference between AI as a tool and AI as an aid in verifying authenticity?

As a tool for making art, AI helps create the work directly, whether on its own or alongside an artist guiding it. As an aid in verifying authenticity it creates nothing but compares and analyses, helping to determine whether a work is genuine or a forgery. It is the difference between the brush in the hand and the specialist's magnifying glass — only in digital form.

Why does the subject of AI matter to the art market?

Artificial intelligence raises the question of who actually owns a work made by an algorithm, and how such a work should be valued at all. At the same time it is changing the way authenticity is verified, which touches on trust across the whole market. It is a subject still looking for its rules, and precisely for that reason it is worth watching.

Can you give an example?

Probably the best-known example is the humanoid robot Ai-Da, whose work was auctioned for more than a million dollars and set off a debate about the value of art made by a machine. In the field of making art with AI, the artist Refik Anadol has worked for years, building large-scale image compositions out of data. And on the authentication side, Art Recognition is worth mentioning, using artificial intelligence to assess the authorship of works.

— Anna Pulkertová, founder of Art Part Club