Ai-Da: Challenging creativity's boundaries in a post-humanist, post-creation era?

AI-Da is the world’s first artist robot. It creates art through a combination of algorithms, cameras, and robotic movements. Created in 2019, she has become famous (or infamous), exhibiting at the Design Museum and the Venice Biennale. AI-Da’s art challenges traditional ideas about creativity and the role of the artist, especially as we grapple with the integration of AI into creative fields. This is the sort of subversion I love in art but which the reactionary art world loathes.

AI-Da raises crucial questions about the nature and boundaries of art. She creates, draws and paints through the use of AI cameras and robotic precision. Is creativity a uniquely human trait? Is this intersection of art and technology, evolving art? Should we be judging the art or artist?

My own view is that we have become trapped in the late 18th Romantic view of authorship, the unique, divinely-inspired, creative spark of the individual. Traditional art since then has valued this mysterious homunculus of creativity. Does AI-Da’s work instead represent a collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence, a reflection of our current technological era rather than a purely autonomous creation? A stronger proposition is that a machine be credited as the creative force, even when it lacks personal experiences or emotions to draw from.

AI-Da is a subversive challenge to the Romantic, human-centric view of creativity as a uniquely human trait. But as I’ve claimed, AI-Da’s very existence suggests we might be entering a post-humanist era, where machines become active participants in cultural production. I have challenged the Romantic view of aesthetics here.

Postproduction

There is an interesting idea from the French writer Bourriaud, that we’ve entered a new era, where art and cultural activity now interprets, reproduces, re-exhibits or utilises works made by others or from already available cultural products. He calls it ‘Postproduction’ I thank Rod J. Naquin for introducing me to this thinker and idea. 

Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (2002) was Bourriaud’s essay which examines the trend, emerging since the early 1990s, where a growing number of artists create art based on pre-existing works. He suggests that this "art of postproduction" is a response to the overwhelming abundance of cultural material in the global information age.

The proliferation of artworks and the art world's inclusion of previously ignored or disdained forms characterise this chaotic cultural landscape. Through postproduction, artists navigate and make sense of this cultural excess by reworking existing materials into new creations.

Postcreation

I’d like to universalise this idea of Postproduction to all forms of human endeavour that can now draw upon a vast common pool of culture; all text, images, audio and video, all of human knowledge and achievements – basically the fruits of all past human production to produce, in a way that can be described as ‘Postcreation’.

This is inspired by the arrival of multimodal LLMs, where vast pools of media representing the sum total of all history, all cultural output from our species, has been captured and used to train huge multimodal models that allow our species to create a new future. With new forms of AI, we are borrowing to create the new. It is a new beginning, a fresh start using technology that we have never seen before in the history of our species, something that seems strange but oddly familiar, thrilling but terrifying – AI.

AI, along with us, does not simply copy, sample or parrot things from the past – together we create new outputs. Neither do they remix, reassemble or reappropriate the past – together we recreate the future. This moves us beyond simple curation, collages and mashups into genuinely new forms of production and expression. We should also avoid seeing it as the reproduction of hybrids, reinterpretations or simple syntheses.

It should not be too readily reduced to one word, rather pre-fixed with ‘re-’; to reimagine, reenvision, reconceptualise, recontextualise, revise, rework, revamp, reinterpret, reframe, remodel, redefine and reinvent new cultural capital. We should not pin it down like a broken butterfly with a simple pin, one word, but let the idea flutter and fly free from the prison of language.

We have been doing this on a small scale for a long time under the illusion, reinforced by late 18th and 19th century Romanticism, that creation is a uniquely human endeavour, when all along it has been a drawing upon the past, therefore deeply rooted in what the brain has experienced and takes from its memories to create anything new. We are now, together, taking things from the entire memory of our cultural past to create the new in acts of Postcreation.

Communal future

This new world or new dawn is more communal, drawing from the well of a vast shared, public collective. We can have a common purpose of mutual effort that leads to a more co-operative, collaborative and unified effort. There were some historical dawns that hinted at this future, the Library at Alexandria, open to all containing the known world's knowledge, Wikipedia a huge, free communal knowledge base, but this is something much more profoundly communal.

The many peoples, cultures and languages of the world can be in this communal effort, not to fix some utopian idea of a common set of values or cultural output but creation beyond what just one group sees as good and evil. This was Nietzsche’s re-evaluative vision. Utopias are always fixed and narrow dystopias. This could be a more innovative and transformative era, a future of openness, a genuine recognition that the future is created by us, not determined wholly by the past. AI is not the machine, it is now ‘us’ speaking to ‘ourselves’, in fruitful dialogue.

Some questions

This is not a stated position, merely the start of a complex debate. So here's a few questions.

What defines creativity—can it exist without human emotion or intention? I think it can, especially if it draws, as humans draw on previous experiences in language or images, as humans do.

Does the value of art diminish if it is created by an AI rather than a human? No. AI-Da's paintings are already selling and slate for six-figure sums. The art establishment have made their judgement.

Is AI-Da truly an autonomous creator, or merely an advanced tool shaped by its programming? It is both. It has been shaped by humans but is autonomous to a degree.

How does AI-Da’s art alter our perception of the boundaries between human and machine creativity? Art moves on and this moves art on. Art has no boundaries. That is the whole point of art, to push boundaries.

Can we still view art as a human-centric endeavour, or is there a shift towards accepting non-human contributors as legitimate artists? This is a shift, albeit the first example of a shift.

How does AI-Da’s art reflect broader societal trends towards technological integration and reliance on algorithms in decision-making? It moves us on. We have something concrete to discuss. That’s good.