It sounds more like a theme park for techies than an art museum. Dataland, the world’s first museum devoted to AI arts, is scheduled to open in Los Angeles this spring. For those wishing to address the vexing question, “Is AI art really art?” I direct you to online forums where the debate currently boils. As important as that question is, however, AI art has made its debut in prestigious galleries around the world, making the status of AI generated artwork a settled issue in the museum world. Therefore, this article considers the language being used to speak about AI in the creative sphere, whether we believe AI art to be truly art or not.
In spite of its acceptance in the professional art world, AI art still gives us pause because it is a collaboration between humans and machines and yet, the terminology surrounding the subject often anthropomorphizes the latter. In the creative sphere, the worry is not so much that machines are going to take over the world as it is that the line between artist and algorithm is blurred, thereby undermining the uniqueness of human creativity. How can we keep the distinction clear in the arts? New-York based artist, Eileen Isagon Skyers, recommends looking at the metaphors and narratives of artists pushing the boundaries. Taking her advice, we can examine the metaphors and narratives surrounding Dataland’s founder and see if the distinction between human and machine is being upheld.
The man behind Dataland is Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American media artist and pioneer in data aesthetics. His work Unsupervised: Machine Hallucinations is the first work of AI art acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. Anadol is known for creating immersive, large-scale “data paintings,” in which, of course, no paint is used. In a TED talk on AI and art, Anadol describes his work saying, “Using architectural spaces as canvases, I collaborate with machines to make buildings dream and hallucinate.” This is this kind of AI-speak that leads to confusion. The term “hallucinate” has already been taken up to describe AI’s tendency to produce false responses, but when it is paired with another anthropomorphism the meaning of both is muddled. A machine cannot dream because dreaming requires a living subject. At another point in his TED talk, Anadol invites the audience “to one last journey into the mind of a machine.” This statement is striking because minds are things persons have. Dataland’s founder does not merely blur the line, he practically erases it. From a reformed Christian perspective, humans are understood to be persons because they are derivative of the absolute personality, the true and living God. In this instance, good theology seems to be an immediate cure for the confusion.
In an overview of Anadol’s exhibition Unsupervised, curators say “it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come.” There it is again; the machine is dreaming. It sounds cool, but dreaming presupposes a dreamer. At his exhibit at NVIDIA’s technology conference in 2024, Anadol invited visitors to “smell the AI dreams” as one AI, trained on scent molecules merged with another AI (Large Nature Model) to generate nature-like scents. But the question remains: Who is dreaming in Anadol’s work?
Language about AI and the arts is tricky because it brings math and art together. Two disparate disciplines converge, and since the language of data processing hardly arouses our aesthetic sensibilities, it borrows poetic description from the art world. AI “paints” rather than processes; it “dreams” rather than generates. Art critic Ben Davis suggests scraping away misleading metaphors in order to understand what is really happening. Such scraping is like pulling back the curtain to see who is really running the show.
What about the narratives behind the project? Anadol says he is inspired by the film Bladerunner (1982). The literary source for the film, Philip K. Dick’s novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” sheds light on Anadol’s fascination with computer “dreams.” You may recall Bladerunner not only promoted the idea that machines dream, it said they were more human than human. The idea of scented dreams could be seen as Anadol’s way of carrying this idea forward in his work. He blurs the lines between human and machine in the arts that Bladerunner blurred in bioengineering over forty years ago. To be fair, he is not the only one.
The incorporation of metaphorical language when talking about AI art is ubiquitous and it persuades people to think of AI as human, or really, really close to it. If online forums are any indication, artists are frustrated and discouraged by this. Perhaps one possible countermeasure is to shift from direct metaphor to simile, as a way to keep the distinction clear. Just as AI VO (voice-over) is used to create human-like speech, AI is used to produce human-like art. Bavinck says it is only the human person, the union of body and soul, created in God’s image, who “peers through the eyes, thinks through the brain, grasps with the hands, or walks with the feet.” When the humanoid, Ai-Da, “painted” King Charles’ portrait last summer, there was no soul peering through the cameras in Ai-Da’s thermoplastic polyurethane “eye-sockets.” Besides, as Hans Rookmaaker noted, humans do not see in a machine-like manner, so whatever Ai-Da is doing, it is not seeing like us. Likewise, when Oxford mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy compares the creation and evolution of AI code to human procreation, specifically the creation of Picasso from his parents, he presupposes atheism, thereby wrongly reducing a human being to code. An atheistic materialistic worldview, which often sees humans as complex biological machines easily slips into specious speech on AI.
Havard history professor, Caroline Elkins, reminds us that AI is doing billions of computations but ultimately, it is the human who has to make the choices of what is entered and accepted. She warns us to be careful not to conflate AI with human creativity. Surely, to avoid such conflation requires resolve and intentionality about the language we use when speaking about AI arts, to ensure our metaphors are understood as metaphors. Christians have the opportunity to remind the world how magnificent humanity is; to shift the awe and wonder from the algorithm back to the individual. Fifty years ago, Francis Schaeffer said we had lost sight of the fact that man is wonderful. By holding fast to the Christian concept of special creation we can emphasize how incredible AI is precisely because it is designed by incredible people made in God’s image. What better way is there to uphold the value of human creativity than to intentionally point back to the human originators behind it all?
Speaking about the AI revolution in the creative sphere, Robert Wong of Google Creative Lab says, “Everything’s changed and nothing has changed.” His statement aligns well with the Christian understanding. In one sense, everything has changed. The ways and rate at which human creativity is being democratized and enhanced are overwhelming. With AI, artists can create an almost infinite array of images without ever going to art school. Likewise, long-standing problems in other artistic fields, such as how to get a newborn baby to express and act on cue have been solved by AI. Everything is changing.
On the other hand, Christians understand that in back of change is the foundation of unchanging reality. In this sense, nothing has changed. The givenness of creation, God-given norms, and human nature remain the same. As the image of God on earth, humanity has been gifted with imagination and creativity unlike any other creature. In addition, humanity’s God-given mission to take dominion over the earth and subdue it remains in full effect. AI has arisen as a new general technology because of human ingenuity and a desire to make life better.
If I lived in LA, I would be the first in line when Dataland opens. The technological and aesthetic feats of the Refik Anadol Studio are sure to be an impressive display. But I also resolve to keep distinctions between AI and humanity clear in the arts, and every sphere, when the lines are blurred. Whether you consider AI art to be real art or not, we should all agree that it is a powerful tool to be used for God’s glory, and the only time it will ever be human is in your dreams.