Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ)
A thread on Reddit features a photograph of a poster advertising the National Gallery of Victoria’s upcoming triennial, an image from Ayoung Kim’s multi-channel video installation, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024).
In the image, a Korean woman is running through a crowded futuristic cityscape in a riding suit and gloves. It is drawn from the video piece about women working as gig-economy delivery drivers in dystopian Seoul besieged by an artificial intelligence that drives them to compete with one another, monitors their labour and skews their sense of time.
The work is made with AI, computer-generated imagery (CGI), video game engines and live action footage.
The Reddit comments are disparaging of the use of generative AI. They do not distinguish between art made with generative AI and AI replacing the artist entirely. They question the gallery’s decision to advertise a work foregrounding AI as an artistic medium.
There is an irony here. The comments rally against a world where AI takes over labour. But Young’s work also attends to this very problem.
The issue appears to pivot on her decision to use generative AI as an artistic medium.
AI saturation
AI infrastructure governs our everyday lives: used in warfare, driving our social feeds, analysing our facial expressions, pilfering the data we upload for harvesting by a handful of tech companies who profit from our cloud capital.
Our data feeds the datasets of commercial generative AI platforms, which saturates the internet with “AI slop”. And we cannot seem to opt out.
It is no surprise Reddit commenters are dismayed by the appearance of art made with generative AI. If art and creativity are also replaced by AI, then what of social life is left untouched by its creep?
Yet their dismay conflates AI replacing the artist, and an artist choosing to work with the technology.
So does an artist’s intention matter?
Media theorist Joanna Zylinska is careful to distinguish between two types of art made with generative AI.
She likens popular AI art to a mind numbing game of Candy Crush: when an artist uses generative AI solely for what it can do, to celebrate its capacity to turn data into visual spectacle.
Critical AI art comes down to the artwork’s capacity to make the implications of the technology visible. This includes its infrastructure, impact on labour and even understanding what it means to be a human.
The role of the gallery
Art institutions worldwide are increasingly focusing on the impact of AI on art and creativity.
Some of these works are heavily critical of AI’s extractive nature.
But art institutions are reliant on corporate sponsorship, visitor engagement and media metrics to secure funding. An artist’s political critique can also become a marketing tool, an icon, or a hero image.
Ayoung Kim’s generative AI poster, taken out of context, is a reminder of this predicament.
Theorist Victor Burgin is suspicious of the role of art galleries in offering a critique of AI. He says art that is critical of AI requires a backstory which cannot take place simply by looking at the work itself.
For Burgin, art’s resistance lies elsewhere, in resisting stereotype, cliche and the ideas ingrained in popular visual culture.
Read more:
AI ‘dreams’ up new realities. How does this impact the way we understand our own dreaming?
Understanding the implications of AI through art
As people become more distrustful of AI replacing artistic labour, and with AI encroaching on many facets of the creative industries, it is imperative we have conversations about what artistic experimentation with AI can offer.
As a creative researcher, I am interested by the way my encounter with a technology shapes my capacity to know it. As a photographer, I think about generative AI as a technology that evolved from the datasets of the world’s photographs. This also means generative AI inherits photographic ways of seeing and remembering the world.
Generative AI taps into a desire for users to visualise anything – from nudes, to Hollywood stars, to seeing the dead live again.
By the time text-to-image platforms arrived in 2021–22, this desire could be realised with as little as a linguistic prompt.
That is the marketing rhetoric, and led me to create a work about an event that was fundamentally impossible to see: my mother before she became my mother.
I wanted to know whether the billions of pilfered images could produce a single image of my mother.
Given the prompt, the exercise was designed to fail. I didn’t want to resolve that paradox, but to use the problem as a way of considering the connections between visual language and image labels embedded in AI systems.
Since making that work, I have grappled with the ethical implications of using generative AI as an artist. AI slop is one facet of my hesitation; the politics of opting out is another. And I keep asking myself, is there a space for the creative practice of art to help us understand and think about AI systems?
A creative practice with generative AI begins by repurposing its systems and working against what they are optimised to do. It means embracing what AI fails to capture and working against its logic. This can include prompting for aspects of social life that resist measure or algorithmic aggregation, such as affects and sensations.
Artistic experimentation, in this instance, may be one of the few places where we can encounter the limits of AI’s insidious encroachment.
Sara Oscar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/10/21/could-thoughtful-ai-art-counter-the-rise-of-ai-slop-why-creatives-today-face-a-paradox/