DAVE COURT
LEARNING MACHINE
23.09.2022 ~ 09.10.2022
Can AI generate “good” art?
The advent of AI has been viewed as threat to the creativity, ambiguity, spontaneity, and uncertainty which hallmark of our very humanity. The launch of AI image generators has been met with backlash from artists who fear that the technological development threatens their autonomy and creativity. Through Learning Machine, Dave Court explores the collapse in the dichotomies of digital and analogue, predictability and the unprecedented, and the blurring of lines between human and machine. In so doing, he reopens questions of the convergence of physical and virtual worlds, and its impact on our understanding of ourselves and our realities.
For this body of work, Court was granted access to Dall-E, an AI tool that generates images based on text-input, as well as creating variations of images uploaded. Trained on a neural network of pictures and their text descriptions, Dall-E not only recognises images and their descriptions, but understands their relationships to other objects and actions and demonstrates that when prompted by text. Like humans, Dall-E is the sum of all of its experiences and relations. Except, when we continue to experience and change, Dall-E is frozen in time; it only knows and understands what it has been trained on up until that point. AI, like the phonetic alphabet or the computer, is an “extension of man that causes deep and lasting changes in him and transforms his environment”
If we view AI as an extension of ourselves, all AI, including Dall-E, inextricably contains the biases and subjectivities of those who program it. Objectivity and ambiguity are therefore unattainable goals - because humans are the sum of all of their experiences, relations, and social contexts, the AI we teach is too. Indeed, AI is widely criticised for its lack of ambiguity and its reproduction and reinforcement of unequally distributed social orders and how this privileges a few, and subjects many to injustice.
- Freya Langley
Learning Machine (Excerpt)
Photograpy : Emmaline Zanelli