Is AI art really art?

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly popular for generating images, a question has roiled the art world: Can AI create art?

At bitforms gallery in San Francisco, the answer is yes. An exhibit called “Artificial Imagination” is on display through late December and features works that were created with or inspired by the generative AI system DALL-E as well as other types of AI. With DALL-E, and other similar systems such as Stable Diffusion or Midjourney, a user can type in words and get back an image.

Steven Sacks, who founded the original bitforms gallery in New York in 2001 (the San Francisco location opened in 2020), has always focused on working with artists at the intersection of art and technology. But this may be the first art show to focus on DALL-E, which was created by OpenAI, and it is the first one Sacks has presented that concentrates so directly on work created with AI, he told CNN Business.

Using technologies such as 3D printing and Photoshop is commonplace in art. But new text-to-image systems like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can pump out impressive-looking images at lightning speed, unlike anything the art world has seen before. In just months, millions of people have flocked to these AI systems and they are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers and images to illustrate news stories. Yet while these systems are gaining ground, they’re also courting controversy. For instance, when an image generated with Midjourney recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, it caused an uproar among artists.

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