Archive:AI art
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Template:Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence visual art, or AI art, is artistic content generated or assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) programs. The classification of AI output as "art" remains controversial, and AI-created works have been variously rejected or recognized by existing artistic institutions.[1][2]
The application of robotics or primitive algorithms to art has been discussed or practiced since antiquity; however, the term primarily refers to visual works created by modern generative AI trained on preexisting content. During the AI boom of the 2020s, text-to-image models such as Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion became widely available to the public, allowing users to quickly generate imagery with little effort.[3][4] The history of artificial intelligence has raised many questions on the nature of art in human–AI collaboration, while commentary about AI art in the 2020s has often focused on issues related to copyright, deception, defamation, and its impact on more traditional artists, including technological unemployment. AI art frequently constitutes AI slop, mass-produced content for online engagement at the expense of quality.
In August 2023, a United States district court ruled that AI art is ineligible for copyright due to failure to meet human authorship.[5][6] In March 2026, it declined to hear a case over whether AI-generated art can be subject to copyright.[7][8][9][10]
History
Antecedents
File:Maillardet's automaton at the Franklin Institute.webm Automation of art dates back at least to the automata of ancient Greek civilization, when inventors such as Daedalus and Hero of Alexandria were described as designing machines capable of writing text, generating sounds, and playing music.[11][12] Such automatons have flourished throughout history, such as Maillardet's automaton, created around 1800 and capable of drawing and writing.[13]
Also in the 19th century, Ada Lovelace wrote that "computing operations" could potentially be used to generate music and poems.[14][15] In 1950, Alan Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" focused on whether machines can mimic human behavior convincingly.[16] Shortly after, the academic discipline of artificial intelligence was founded at a research workshop at Dartmouth College in 1956.[17]
Since its founding, AI researchers have explored philosophical questions about the nature of the human mind and the consequences of creating artificial beings with human-like intelligence; these issues have previously been explored by myth, fiction, and philosophy since antiquity.[18]
Early history

Since the founding of AI in the 1950s, artists have used artificial intelligence to create artistic works. These works were sometimes referred to as algorithmic art,[19] computer art, digital art, or new media art.[20]
One of the first significant AI art systems is AARON, developed by Harold Cohen beginning in the late 1960s at the University of California at San Diego.[21] AARON uses a symbolic rule-based approach to generate technical images in the era of GOFAI programming, and it was developed by Cohen with the goal of being able to code the act of drawing.[22] AARON was exhibited in 1972 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.[23] From 1973 to 1975, Cohen refined AARON during a residency at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University.[24] In 2024, the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited AI art from throughout Cohen's career, including re-created versions of his early robotic drawing machines.[24]
Karl Sims has exhibited art created with artificial life since the 1980s. He received an M.S. in computer graphics from the MIT Media Lab in 1987 and was artist-in-residence from 1990 to 1996 at the supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence company Thinking Machines.[25][26][27] In both 1991 and 1992, Sims won the Golden Nica award at Prix Ars Electronica for his videos using artificial evolution.[28][29][30] In 1997, Sims created the interactive artificial evolution installation Galápagos for the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo.[31] Sims received an Emmy Award in 2019 for outstanding achievement in engineering development.[32]
In 2014, Stephanie Dinkins began working on Conversations with Bina48.[33] For the series, Dinkins recorded her conversations with BINA48, a social robot that resembles a middle-aged black woman.[34][35] In 2019, Dinkins won the Creative Capital award for her creation of an evolving artificial intelligence based on the "interests and culture(s) of people of color."[36]
In 2015, Sougwen Chung began Mimicry (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1), an ongoing collaboration between the artist and a robotic arm.[37] In 2019, Chung won the Lumen Prize for her continued performances with a robotic arm that uses AI to attempt to draw in a manner similar to Chung.[38]
AI boom

In 2018, an auction sale of artificial intelligence art was held at Christie's in New York where the AI artwork Edmond de Belamy sold for Template:Currency, which was almost 45 times higher than its estimate of Template:Currency–10,000. The artwork was created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective.[39][40][41]
Impact and applications
AI has the potential for a societal transformation, which may include enabling the expansion of non-commercial niche genres (such as cyberpunk derivatives like solarpunk) by amateurs, novel entertainment, fast prototyping,[42] increasing art-making accessibility,[42] and artistic output per effort or expenses or time[42]—e.g., via generating drafts, draft-definitions, and image components (inpainting). Generated images are sometimes used as sketches,[43] low-cost experiments,[44] inspiration, or illustrations of proof-of-concept-stage ideas. Additional functionalities or improvements may also relate to post-generation manual editing (i.e., polishing), such as subsequent tweaking with an image editor.[44]
Professional visual artists and designers used generative AI in early-stage conceptualization (divergent thinking) more than final production (convergent thinking) and practices producing digital or ephemeral outputs (e.g., UI/UX design, concept art) more readily integrate these than those producing physical, permanent artifacts (e.g., sculpture, architecture).[45] In physical domains, concerns regarding structural integrity, material constraints, and cultural "ethno-computation" often limit AI to a "complementary enhancement" role rather than a substitute for production.[46] Furthermore, attitudes toward adoption vary significantly by career stage, with entry-level professionals viewing generative AI as a pragmatic extension of digital tools necessary for market competitiveness, whereas senior practitioners often express critical skepticism regarding the devaluation of embodied expertise and long-term skill development.[45]
Related terminology
Synthetic media, which includes AI art, was described in 2022 as a major technology-driven trend that will affect business in the coming years.[42] Harvard Kennedy School researchers voiced concerns about synthetic media serving as a vector for political misinformation soon after studying the proliferation of AI art on the X platform.[47] Synthography is a proposed term for the practice of generating images that are similar to photographs using AI.[48]
Criticism
Philosophical context
AI-generated visual art has been discussed in relation to questions of creativity, authorship, embodiment, and the status of images. The technology has also renewed debates about photographic and cinematic indexicality, since generative systems can produce images without recording a corresponding physical event in front of a camera.
In his 2026 essay "Manifesto of Reality: Cinema After the Physical Trace", filmmaker and artist Johannes Grenzfurthner argued for "ontological disclosure", distinguishing between physically referential, hybrid, and fully synthetic images.[49] Artist and educator Matt Ballou discussed Grenzfurthner's argument in a 2026 talk on AI and pedagogy, relating it to concerns about embodiment, authorship, and the ability to verify whether an image, document, or event has a physical origin.[50] The argument was also discussed in a 2026 essay published by paraflows, which characterized Grenzfurthner's distinction between event-based, hybrid, and fully synthetic images as an aesthetic and political response to the weakening of the traditional boundary between documentary and fiction.[51]
Classification as "art"
The usage of the label "art" when it applies to works generated by AI software has led to debate among artists, philosophers, scholars, and others. Various observers argue that referring to machine generated images as "art" undermines the traditional characteristics of human artistry, such as creativity, skill, and intentionality. Present-day definitions of true artistic creation often put an emphasis on the requirement of human-level intentions, personal experience and emotion, as well as historical and/or artistic context.[52]
According to a research study from the National Library of Medicine, humans inherently show a bias against artwork described as being AI-generated. When participants of the study were shown two comparable images, with only one presented as having been generated by AI, subjects were more likely to rate the one described as being artificially generated lower in artistic value. This suggests that social and cultural attitudes can shape the determination of whether an image is considered art, regardless of the image's other visual features.[53]
In a 2023 report submitted to the Annual Convention of Digital Art Observers, Samuel Loomis wrote that the term "AI art" acknowledges its dual nature as a product of human guidance and machine-driven generative systems, when evaluating it by the same critical standards applied to traditional art.[54]
Analysis of existing art using AI
In addition to the creation of original art, research methods that use AI have been generated to quantitatively analyze digital art collections. This has been made possible due to the large-scale digitization of artwork in the past few decades. According to CETINIC and SHE (2022), using artificial intelligence to analyze already-existing art collections can provide new perspectives on the development of artistic styles and the identification of artistic influences.[55][56]
Two computational methods, close reading and distant viewing, are the typical approaches used to analyze digitized art.[57] Close reading focuses on specific visual aspects of one piece. Some tasks performed by machines in close reading methods include computational artist authentication and analysis of brushstrokes or texture properties. In contrast, through distant viewing methods, the similarity across an entire collection for a specific feature can be statistically visualized. Common tasks relating to this method include automatic classification, object detection, multimodal tasks, knowledge discovery in art history, and computational aesthetics.[56] Synthetic images can also be used to train AI algorithms for art authentication and to detect forgeries.[58]
Researchers have also introduced models that predict emotional responses to art. One such model is ArtEmis, a large-scale dataset paired with machine learning models. ArtEmis includes emotional annotations from over 6,500 participants along with textual explanations. By analyzing both visual inputs and the accompanying text descriptions from this dataset, ArtEmis enables the generation of nuanced emotional predictions.[59][60]
Other forms of AI art
AI has also been used in arts outside of visual arts. Generative AI has been used to create music, as well as in video game production beyond imagery, especially for level design (e.g., for custom maps) and creating new content (e.g., quests or dialogue) or interactive stories in video games.[61][62] AI has also been used in the literary arts,[63] such as helping with writer's block, inspiration, or rewriting segments.[64][65][66][67] In the culinary arts, some prototype cooking robots can dynamically taste, which can assist chefs in analyzing the content and flavor of dishes during the cooking process.[68]
See also
References
- ↑ Hüsmen, Arife (November 2024). "AI in the Creative Industries: Strikes, Debates and Implications". 20th International Symposium of Communication in the Millennium: 193–199. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/387368228.
- ↑ Todorovic, Milos (2024). "AI and Heritage: A Discussion on Rethinking Heritage in a Digital World". International Journal of Cultural and Social Studies 10 (1): 1–11. doi:. https://www.academia.edu/121596389. Retrieved on 4 July 2024.
- ↑ Vincent, James (24 May 2022). "All these images were generated with Google's latest text-to-image AI". The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/24/23139297/google-imagen-text-to-image-ai-system-examples-paper.
- ↑ Edwards, Benj (2 August 2024). "FLUX: This new AI image generator is eerily good at creating human hands" (in en-US). https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/08/flux-this-new-ai-image-generator-is-eerily-good-at-creating-human-hands/.
- ↑ "AI-generated art can't be copyrighted, US court rules" (in en). 20 August 2023. https://www.jpost.com/business-and-innovation/all-news/article-755483.
- ↑ "Court Finds AI-Generated Work Is Not Copyrightable" (in en). https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2023/08/court-finds-aigenerated-work-not-copyrightable-for-failure-to-meet-human-authorship-requirementbut-questions-remain.
- ↑ Brittain, Blake (3 March 2026). "US Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material". https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-declines-hear-dispute-over-copyrights-ai-generated-material-2026-03-02/.
- ↑ Guy, Zoe (21 August 2023). "AI-Generated Art Is Not Copyrightable, Judge Rules" (in en). https://www.vulture.com/2023/08/ai-art-copyright-ineligible.html.
- ↑ Roth, Emma (2 March 2026). "AI-generated art can't be copyrighted after Supreme Court declines to review the rule" (in en-US). https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright.
- ↑ Mangan, Dan (2025-03-19). "Art created autonomously by AI cannot be copyrighted, federal appeals court rules" (in en). https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted-appeals-court-rules.html.
- ↑ Noel Sharkey (4 July 2007), A programmable robot from 60 AD, 2611, https://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/07/programmable-robot-from-60ad.html, retrieved on 22 October 2019
- ↑ Brett, Gerard (July 1954), "The Automata in the Byzantine "Throne of Solomon"", Speculum 29 (3), doi:
- ↑ "Maillardet's Automaton" (in en). 8 March 2014. https://www.fi.edu/en/history-resources/automaton.
- ↑ Natale, Simone; Henrickson, Leah (4 March 2022). "The Lovelace effect: Perceptions of creativity in machines". New Media & Society 26 (4): 1909–1926. doi:. ISSN 1461-4448. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221077278. Retrieved on 7 March 2026.
- ↑ Lovelace, A. (1843). Notes by the translator. Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, 3, 666-731.
- ↑ Turing, Alan (October 1950). "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf.
- ↑ Crevier, Daniel (1993). AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence.. New York, NY: BasicBooks. p. 109. ISBN 0-465-02997-3. https://archive.org/details/aitumultuoushist00crev.
- ↑ Newquist, HP (1994). The Brain Makers: Genius, Ego, And Greed In The Quest For Machines That Think. New York: Macmillan/SAMS. pp. 45–53. ISBN 978-0-672-30412-5. https://archive.org/details/brainmakers0000newq.
- ↑ Elgammal, Ahmed (2019). "AI Is Blurring the Definition of Artist". American Scientist 107 (1): 18. doi:. ISSN 0003-0996.
- ↑ Greenfield, Gary (3 April 2015). "When the machine made art: the troubled history of computer art, by Grant D. Taylor" (in en). Journal of Mathematics and the Arts 9 (1–2): 44–47. doi:. ISSN 1751-3472. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17513472.2015.1009865.
- ↑ McCorduck, Pamela (1991) (in English). AARONS's Code: Meta-Art. Artificial Intelligence, and the Work of Harold Cohen. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. p. 210. ISBN 0-7167-2173-2. https://archive.org/details/aaronscodemetaar0000mcco.
- ↑ Poltronieri, Fabrizio Augusto; Hänska, Max (23 October 2019). "Technical Images and Visual Art in the Era of Artificial Intelligence" (in en). Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts. Braga Portugal: ACM. pp. 1–8. doi:. ISBN 978-1-4503-7250-3.
- ↑ "HAROLD COHEN (1928–2016)" (in en-US). 9 May 2016. https://www.artforum.com/news/harold-cohen-1928-2016-59932.
- ↑ 24.0 24.1 Diehl, Travis (15 February 2024). "A.I. Art That's More Than a Gimmick? Meet AARON" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/arts/design/aaron-ai-whitney.html.
- ↑ "Karl Sims - ACM SIGGRAPH HISTORY ARCHIVES" (in en-US). 20 August 2017. https://history.siggraph.org/person/karl-sims/.
- ↑ "Karl Sims" (in en). https://cap.csail.mit.edu/engage/spotlights/karl-sims.
- ↑ "Karl Sims" (in en). https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-1998/karl-sims.
- ↑ "Golden Nicas" (in en-US). https://ars.electronica.art/center/en/golden-nicas/.
- ↑ "Panspermia by Karl Sims, 1990". http://www.karlsims.com/panspermia.html.
- ↑ "Liquid Selves by Karl Sims, 1992". http://www.karlsims.com/liquid-selves.html.
- ↑ ""Galápagos" - Karl SIMS (1997)" (in en). https://www.ntticc.or.jp/en/archive/works/galapagos/.
- ↑ "Winners" (in en). https://www.emmys.com/awards/engineering-emmys/winners.
- ↑ "Robots, Race, and Algorithms: Stephanie Dinkins at Recess Assembly". 7 November 2017. http://magazine.art21.org/2017/11/07/robots-race-and-algorithms-stephanie-dinkins-at-recess-assembly/.
- ↑ Small, Zachary (7 April 2017). "Future Perfect: Flux Factory's Intersectional Approach to Technology" (in en-US). https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/future-perfect-a-call-for-intersectional-technology-at-flux-factory-58475/.
- ↑ Dunn, Anna (11 July 2018). "Multiply, Identify, Her". https://brooklynrail.org/2018/07/artseen/Multiply-Identify-Her.
- ↑ "Not the Only One" (in en). https://creative-capital.org/projects/not-the-only-one/.
- ↑ "Drawing Operations (2015) – Sougwen Chung (愫君)" (in en-US). 4 November 2019. https://sougwen.com/project/drawing-operations.
- ↑ "Sougwen Chung" (in en-GB). https://www.lumenprize.com/2019-winners/sougwen-chung.
- ↑ "Is artificial intelligence set to become art's next medium?". 12 December 2018. https://www.christies.com/en/stories/a-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-a-machine-0cd01f4e232f4279a525a446d60d4cd1.
- ↑ Cohn, Gabe (25 October 2018). "AI Art at Christie's Sells for $432,500" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-sold-christies.html.
- ↑ Turnbull, Amanda (6 January 2020). "The price of AI art: Has the bubble burst?" (in en-US). http://theconversation.com/the-price-of-ai-art-has-the-bubble-burst-128698.
- ↑ 42.0 42.1 42.2 42.3 Elgan, Mike (1 November 2022). "How 'synthetic media' will transform business forever" (in en). Computerworld. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3678172/how-synthetic-media-will-transform-business-forever.html.
- ↑ Roose, Kevin (21 October 2022). "A.I.-Generated Art Is Already Transforming Creative Work". The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/technology/ai-generated-art-jobs-dall-e-2.html.
- ↑ 44.0 44.1 Leswing, Kif. "Why Silicon Valley is so excited about awkward drawings done by artificial intelligence" (in en). CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/08/generative-ai-silicon-valleys-next-trillion-dollar-companies.html.
- ↑ 45.0 45.1 Tsao, Jack; Liang, Cindy Xinyi; Nogues, Collier; Wong, Alice (2026). "Perceptions and integration of generative artificial intelligence in creative practices and industries: a scoping review and conceptual model". AI & Society 41 (3): 2259–2278. doi:. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02667-2.
- ↑ Roncoroni, U. L.; Crousse De Vallongue, V.; Centurion Bolaños, O. (2024). "Computational creativity issues in generative design and digital fabrication of complex 3D meshes". International Journal of Architectural Computing 23 (2): 582–600. doi:. https://doi.org/10.1177/14780771241260850.
- ↑ Corsi, Giulio; Marino, Bill; Wong, Willow (3 June 2024). "The spread of synthetic media on X" (in en-US). Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review. doi:. https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/the-spread-of-synthetic-media-on-x/.
- ↑ Reinhuber, Elke (2 December 2021). "Synthography–An Invitation to Reconsider the Rapidly Changing Toolkit of Digital Image Creation as a New Genre Beyond Photography". Google Scholar. https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=cjLjVk8AAAAJ&citation_for_view=cjLjVk8AAAAJ:hC7cP41nSMkC.
- ↑ Grenzfurthner, Johannes (20 February 2026). "Manifesto of Reality: Cinema After the Physical Trace". https://midwestfilmjournal.com/2026/02/20/manifesto-of-reality-cinema-after-the-physical-trace/.
- ↑ Ballou, Matt (31 May 2026). "Reflections on AI and Pedagogy". https://mattballou.com/2026/05/31/reflections-on-ai-and-pedagogy/.
- ↑ "Das Kino steht vor Gericht — Johannes Grenzfurthners Manifesto of Reality" (in de). June 2026. https://paraflows.wien/essays/manifesto-reality/.
- ↑ Coeckelbergh, Mark (1 September 2017). "Can Machines Create Art?" (in en). Philosophy & Technology 30 (3): 285–303. doi:. ISSN 2210-5441. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0231-5.
- ↑ Horton, C. Blaine; White, Michael W.; Iyengar, Sheena S. (3 November 2023). "Bias against AI art can enhance perceptions of human creativity". Scientific Reports 13 (1): 19001. doi:. ISSN 2045-2322. PMID 37923764. Bibcode: 2023NatSR..1319001H.
- ↑ Jonathan Doe: "A Summary and Analysis of Contemporary Digital Media Trends", published in Die Zeitung (February 2024)
- ↑ Cetinic, Eva; She, James (31 May 2022). "Understanding and Creating Art with AI: Review and Outlook" (in en). ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications 18 (2): 1–22. doi:. ISSN 1551-6857. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3475799. Retrieved on 8 April 2023.
- ↑ 56.0 56.1 Cetinic, Eva; She, James (16 February 2022). "Understanding and Creating Art with AI: Review and Outlook". ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications 18 (2): 66:1–66Kate Vass2. doi:. ISSN 1551-6857.
- ↑ Template:Cite conference
- ↑ Ostmeyer, Johann; Schaerf, Ludovica; Buividovich, Pavel; Charles, Tessa; Postma, Eric; Popovici, Carina (14 February 2024). "Synthetic images aid the recognition of human-made art forgeries". PLOS ONE (United States) 19 (2). doi:. ISSN 1932-6203. PMID 38354162. Bibcode: 2024PLoSO..1995967O.
- ↑ Template:Cite arXiv
- ↑ Myers, Andrew (22 March 2021). "Artist's Intent: AI Recognizes Emotions in Visual Art" (in en). https://hai.stanford.edu/news/artists-intent-ai-recognizes-emotions-visual-art.
- ↑ Yannakakis, Geogios N. (15 May 2012). "Game AI revisited". Proceedings of the 9th conference on Computing Frontiers. pp. 285–292. doi:. ISBN 978-1-4503-1215-8.
- ↑ "AI creates new levels for Doom and Super Mario games". BBC News. 8 May 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44040007.
- ↑ Katsnelson, Alla (29 August 2022). "Poor English skills? New AIs help researchers to write better" (in en). Nature 609 (7925): 208–209. doi:. PMID 36038730. Bibcode: 2022Natur.609..208K.
- ↑ "KoboldAI/KoboldAI-Client". 9 November 2022. https://github.com/KoboldAI/KoboldAI-Client.
- ↑ Dzieza, Josh (20 July 2022). "Can AI write good novels?". The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper.
- ↑ "AI Writing Assistants: A Cure for Writer's Block or Modern-Day Clippy?" (in en). PC Magazine. https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/ai-writing-assistants-a-cure-for-writers-block-or-modern-day-clippy.
- ↑ Song, Victoria (2 November 2022). "Google's new prototype AI tool does the writing for you". The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/2/23435258/google-ai-writing-wordcraft-lamda.
- ↑ Sochacki, Grzegorz; Abdulali, Arsen; Iida, Fumiya (2022). "Mastication-Enhanced Taste-Based Classification of Multi-Ingredient Dishes for Robotic Cooking". Frontiers in Robotics and AI 9. doi:. ISSN 2296-9144. PMID 35603082.
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