Welcome to Art Angle, an Artnet News podcast that dives into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story to earth. Join us each week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market and more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators and diners. other leading experts in the field.
Today, in the spring of 2023, it seems nearly impossible to escape news, rumours, debates, musings, open letters, rants, scandals, lawsuits, or nearly any other form of human exchange on artificial intelligence.
Whether the focus is specifically on large language models like Chat-GPT or text-to-image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney, the discourse around AI technology has only grown broader, more passionate and more confusing since last fall. That’s when a series of truly surreal events on live-streaming platform Twitch helped bring to light the growing tensions between AI-powered image generators and human performers. . While the story in question rested on an accusation of plagiarism, it also served as a stepping stone to an ongoing existential crisis in the art world – an existential crisis that is only ever intensifying as the influence , accessibility and aesthetic quality of algorithmic image generators continue. upgrade.
In October, Artnet News editor Tim Schneider interviewed contributor and pod friend Zachary Small about the Twitch controversy and the broader issues facing visual culture in the age of great AI. . In many ways, this conversation is even more relevant now than it was then. SO. If you missed it the first time around, or just want to take stock of the increasingly wild landscape of art and technology, here’s your second chance…
At the crossroads of art and technology, no development has sucked in more oxygen this year than the rise of AI-powered image generators. Not so long ago, such projects were fringe experiments with results that were generally more intriguing for what they did wrong than for what they did right.
But in 2022, AI-based image generators have taken a leap forward in quality, speed, and accessibility. It’s no exaggeration to say that, thanks to these tools, never in the history of civilization has it been easier, faster or cheaper to produce professional-looking visuals of anything a person could imagine, with or without artistic training.
It’s both extremely cool and extremely disturbing, especially if you’re a human who makes a living as a commercial illustrator. Last October, a strange saga that unfolded on the live streaming platform Twitch showed how the the tension between flesh-and-blood image makers and AI is getting louder and weirder by the daywith serious consequences for age-old debates about plagiarism, ownership, and the value of making art in the first place.
Fortunately, the knowledgeable and fearless Zachary Small has followed the saga and today joined art industry editor Tim Schneider to walk through the initial scandal and murky future of commercial art at the era of AI Buckle up, because this is going to get a little surreal…
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