Automation, Authorship, and Authenticity: What does Art Have to Say about AI?

When generative AI instantly produces images and videos, what is left for human artists to create? Do artworks infused with AI have an 'aura'? Who gets to decide the authorship and authenticity of works generated by computer algorithms? Does AI automate and perpetuate social inequity? This panel explores questions of creativity and equity in the current age of dramatic automation. Artists, technologists, scholars in art history, media studies, and digital humanities are invited to share multiple perspectives on the dynamic entanglement of art, AI, and society.

Contemporary artists reimagine relationships between artistic labor and automated processes, human and nonhuman systems, and critique AI in exacerbating biases and unequal distribution of power and resources. Alexander Reben creates bronze sculptures based on text and image output of generative AI; Anicka Yi designs microorganism-inspired machines programed with AI software; Stephanie Dinkins challenged algorithmic injustice and the lack of representation of people of color in the training data of AI systems; Lauren Lee McCarthy critiques the effects of surveillance and algorithms on social life. Other artists explore AI as a new medium in negotiating the power struggle between human intentionality and capitalistic apparatus. In the age of digitization, does the materiality of art still hold value? Does art imbued with algorithms create meanings? The panel welcomes proposals examining AI’s impact on art and human creativity, but also encourages perspectives on how art challenges AI, and how art can contribute to equitable world-making through AI’s word and image.