Our contributor Jean-Baptiste Gauvin interviewed Antonio Somaini, curator of the exhibition “Le monde selon l’IA“ (“The world according to AI”) at the Jeu de Paume.
With “Le monde selon l’IA“, the Jeu de Paume is tackling the major theme currently stirring up the world of culture. This vast exhibition allows visitors to delve into the works created in collaboration with artificial intelligence over the past decade and make visible what we struggle to see. An interview with the curator of this exhibition, Antonio Somaini, a researcher in the field of visual culture and professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris.
Can you briefly remind us what the concept of artificial intelligence is and where it comes from?
The concept of artificial intelligence was first used in 1955 in the United States by a researcher, John McCarthy, who organized a workshop on AI at a university the following year. He spoke for the first time of this concept, which would become the name subsequently used in a field of research that would develop over the following decades. While this concept has existed for nearly seventy years now, its meaning has changed considerably as different technologies have developed. Today it is a concept that designates algorithms and models that, after going through a training phase, become capable of autonomously carry out increasingly complex operations (detection, analysis, recognition, prediction, synthesis, etc.) Today, AI infiltrates all layers of our society, our culture, our economy, our technologies, our military operations… We therefore decided to see how contemporary artists, over the past ten years, have reacted to this growing presence of AI throughout our culture. We brought together around forty contemporary artists to create a journey that addresses the way in which AI has been analyzed, received and criticized.
AI is therefore a relatively old concept, but one that is being deployed in a new way today. Why address this theme in a museum, and more specifically in a museum dedicated to images?
AI operates almost everywhere today, often invisibly and discreetly. We often talk about algorithms as impenetrable black boxes that perform operations that even programmers don’t fully understand. What’s interesting is that the impact of AI on images is the visible surface of all these transformations. The world of images, of visual culture, of artistic practices that use AI, is a surface that allows us to understand what is happening. Today, the field of images is completely transformed by AI. We can generate, modify, generate, see, describe, and transmit images through AI, and this profoundly transforms our relationship with the visible world in general. My field of research consists in the study of visual culture, and therefore the transformations observed here are very profound. This exhibition attempts to make them clearer and more understandable. Many artists have been at the forefront with their ability to use AI, to explore it, to divert it to uses that were not intended, to decipher it, to reveal its inner workings. Artists, for the past ten years, have played a very important role in the attempt to understand this technology and assess its impact.
The works of the artists you present were thus essentially created with artificial intelligence. Can you give us a telling example?
Yes, Grégory Chatonsky’s new installation. It’s a new installation called “The Fourth Memory.” The title refers to an idea by philosopher Bernard Stiegler according to which the third memory is the memory stored on a physical medium—like a vinyl record or a printed photo, for example. For Grégory Chatonsky, AI is a form of “fourth” memory since it is trained with enormous quantities of “third memory.” AI thus begins to develop its own memory. For the artist, AI then served to imagine a whole series of possible lives he could have lived. He thus conceived a sort of autobiographical work, like a posthumous work, after his death, where the AI was able to assimilate all the traces he left behind, all the images he created, all the texts he wrote, and then generate a series of fragments of possible lives. I think it’s a work that says a lot about what AI can be and do.
Artificial intelligence, especially in its latest versions, demonstrates a breathtaking ability to produce images and words. Is AI endowed with creativity?
We need to decide what we mean by “creativity.” What I can say is that in all the works we present, there is always talk of “co-creativity” between humans, artists, and these AI models. What we propose is a journey that speaks of this new form of coexistence, co-thinking, and co-imagination that unfolds when artists work with AI. I wouldn’t say that AI, per se, is endowed with creativity, but I would say that new forms of creativity emerge from these collaborations with AI, from these new forms of interaction.
Since the works were created using artificial intelligence, in this case, who is the author?
The authors are definitely the artists. The artists made a huge number of choices in all cases. While they sometimes delegated certain operations to these AI models, the choices they made, the selection of images—how to display them, why they generated them rather than others—these are human choices. But this is indeed a new form of interaction between machine and human that is taking shape, and which, moreover, is part of a long history dating back at least to the invention of photography, a co-creation with machines that are partly automated, partly mechanical.
Do you think that artificial intelligence takes anything away from the artist’s knowhow?
I don’t think it takes anything away; it adds something. The history of 20th-century art is full of moments where artists intentionally chose to delegate part of the form of their works to chance. We can think of Pollock’s dripping technique, where he drips paint without having complete control over where it falls. Here, the AI models perform operations autonomously, and there is an element of chance when we use them. Artists like this form of chance. They like to encounter this “other” entity that has its own autonomy. The artists in the exhibition therefore don’t see this as a loss at all. Then again, it’s a different story if we start to think about the impact AI can have on other sectors of artistic creation, such as illustration, animation, advertising, etc. There, there’s a great risk of job loss, it’s true, and the exhibition also takes that into account.
AI also has ethical and ecological limitations: it relies on exploited subcontractors, it builds from millions of existing works, and it consumes enormous amounts of energy. How do artists take this dimension into account?
I’m thinking of one work in particular in the exhibition, a large diagram that is the result of a collaboration between researcher Kate Crawford and graphic designer Vladan Joler, which they named “Anatomy of an AI System.” With this diagram, they manage to trace the entire vast network of computation, transmission, and energy consumption that powers a simple object that looks like a small black box. And so they show the enormity of the non-renewable resources that enable the functioning of a single AI object. It’s a way of making visible the networks that big tech companies prefer to hide from us, particularly with the smooth surfaces of our technological objects – like our cell phones. This contributes to hiding from us the disastrous environmental impact of AI. It’s one of the works that speaks very well of these issues, in my opinion.
What future do you see for creativity? Will it necessarily be driven by artificial intelligence in the world of tomorrow?
No, I think the rise of AI will certainly also provoke reactions that will lead to the rediscovery of manual practices, very material, non-digital practices. It will be very interesting to see what happens. There will also, unfortunately, be job cuts in certain creative fields (illustration, animation, advertising, the fashion world, etc.). Afterwards, there will be artists who will continue to explore AI, analyze it, and sometimes criticize it. They will see how it changes humans, human thought, and human creativity in general.
Interview by Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
