In my presentation I will discuss the impact of Artificial Intelligence [AI] in art and image creation, a phenomenon that stirred attention and generated heated debates in both popular press and scholarly publications. The debates are mainly associated with and generated by the emergence and increasing popularity of various visualization systems available, since the early 2022, on platforms such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Chat GPT, etc.
The very principle on which these platforms work – they produce images (or texts) according to the content of the “prompts” introduced by the user – generate certain tensions between personal (subjective) input and machinic (collective, resourced, mixed) response, or, in other words, a conflicting encounter between individual agency and computer control. The question that logically arises is how can we define in this circumstances the very idea of authorship? How much human and how much computer is involved in an AI (artistic) image? As a consequence, we should ask to what extent AI affects established notions and practices related to the ethics and intellectual property of the art object?
I claim that the delegation of artist’s role to the computer and the problematic identification of authorship affects not only the ideas of authorship, but also other important notions, values and artistic mechanisms such as unicity, originality, art market and the traditional role of art institution (galleries, museums, biennials and collections) conceived structurally on individualities, on uniqueness and originality, and intrinsic value of the art object. I will discuss these aspects commenting some of the most relevant AI artworks produced recently by various international and local artists.