At Meet, the centre dedicated to digital art and culture in Milan, an exhibition tells the story of a recent experiment in creating art with artificial intelligence. Ten (human, it should be stressed) artists tried their hand at it. But can AI make art? No, according to many, including an authoritative voice like Ted Chiang, perhaps the most important science fiction writer (but also a programmer), who recently published an article in The New Yorker with the compelling title: 'Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art'. The exhibition aims to prove the opposite.
"Those who claim that you cannot make art with A.I. because you do not make enough choices fall into a banal error: how can you calculate all the choices a person makes before creating a work?" observes Francesco D'Isa, writer and philosopher and one of the artists involved in the exhibition, along with Francesco Beragnoli, Alessandra Condello and others. All ten used the Yoga Slim 7x, Lenovo's first computer with Copilot+, Microsoft's artificial intelligence, to create their works.
Fragment of Viaggio in Italia by Francesco Beragnoli: a documentary that explores existence through a ‘mathematical simulation’ of memories.
The message that the participating artists wanted to convey was clear: AI does not replace human thought, but is a tool to be mastered, on a par with a paintbrush, a pencil or any other expressive medium. Like the artistic avant-gardes, which by their very nature are destabilising, shocking and innovative, the use of AI offers new possibilities without replacing the artist's creativity.
And from the choice of tool to the expression of the idea, the results on show at Meet are indeed quite disorienting: Mauro Martino's Me-Me is a video sequence of self-portraits in which the distortion of context and person reflects the alienation of contemporary Milan; the duo from Accurat Studio have created a meta-work analysing the evolution of Western art through the information acquired by AI, questioning what is definitely art in everyone's eyes; and again, Lorenzo Bacci and Flavio Moriniello have documented rave culture through the lens of artificial intelligence. Francesco D'Isa himself participates with a pictorial-digital work that pushes AI to error and explores the role of error in artistic creation.
This is just a first step. Valerio Borgonovo, curator of the exhibition, hints that the next step could be an exhibition that focuses on prompts, i.e. instructions given to an artificial intelligence system, because "AI teaches us to stop looking for answers and start understanding how to ask the right questions".