Generative AI systems - the new art factory?

Art and technology, throughout the ages have had a close relationship whereby technology has influenced and facilitated works by artists and designers. The new materials of twentieth-century technology, for example, provided both the means and the inspiration for the three-dimensional works of the Russian Constructivists. László Moholy-Nagy, the painter and photographer of Bauhaus fame, argued for the integration of industry and art and suggested it would be ideal to ring up a factory and order one's art according to specifications. Andy Warhol, known for The Factory (his studio), created works using Amiga computers in the 1980s and is quoted saying, 'I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want do to. I think everybody should be a machine.' And now, text-to-image generators built on huge data sets - and whether Open Source or Closed Source LLMs - search for images not yet created. changing how today’s creatives will likely produce, or co-produce their work. So there's a long history of artists inspired by and adapting to technology and even led by technology. But when art is reduced to a use case (list of actions) for technology, are we bound to a proliferation of shallow artistic engagement, asks Simon Kenny, an independent researcher and educator. https://medium.com/@skenwrites/the-art-of-ai-prompt-engineering-dd4f23138f7a.

AI facilitates ideation across cultures

Generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT can help designers not only generate but also communicate ideas and whether in spoken, written or visual forms, or combinations thereof. Moreover, chatbots can be particularly helpful to designers for whom English is a second language and so enabling them to focus on the creative content of their idea. That is, human language (spoken and written), although supple and flexible, does not always fully capture the richness of ideas while remaining mindful of the interrelationship between concepts and lived experience. So the original state of the idea might get diffused, distorted or lost in translation from one language to another, notably when it comes to cultural nuances or idiomatic expressions. This highlights why spoken or written words need to be supplemented or supported by images in the ideation process (multi-modal communication). Generative artificial intelligence, then, is becoming an influential and practical design tool in the development of ideas and ideas communication.