Find The Artist
Artist and Generative AI
text to image
Year: 2022
Digital Size: 23,622 px × 11,811 px (300 dpi)
Exhibition Print: Pigment ink on Fine Art Canvas
Printed Image Size: 160 × 80 cm
Video 40'' in a loop
2025 image to video
The bizarre landscape of Find the Artist, composed of thirty-three generated images, was created in under an hour using one of the early generative AI image-making tools publicly released online in 2022, prompted by user input and guided by pre-programmed artistic styles These were the first widely accessible attempts—where AI was still "learning" how to see, imagine, and construct form., the images emerging almost instantly. Today, AI offers "more seamless" results. But has something been lost in this rapid refinement?
Has the raw authenticity of early AI—its strange distortions, its unintentional poetry—faded in favour of polished predictability?
So, who is the artist of the generative AI artwork?
The user, the programmer, or the machine learning algorithm?
One might argue that generative AI functions merely as a tool, much like the camera once did. However, as artificial intelligence continues to blur the lines between human and machine capabilities, urgent questions emerge: Can machine learning models truly emulate the creative process? What happens to the cognitive and emotional exchange between artist and viewer when the origin of a work becomes opaque or ambiguous? How do we distinguish between random algorithmic output and art that carries intention, history, and emotional depth? Will AI eventually replace the artist, or simply reshape what it means to be one? Though we may still be some distance from definitive answers, the urgency of these questions can no longer be dismissed. The absurdism of AI—paired with its access to echoes of historical absurdities—hides in plain sight. It perplexes us with its language and mechanisms, while offering strange new parodies of meaning and authorship. We are invited to reflect on the extent to which our present and future realities are already simulated. And to ask: How aware are we of the ways our perceptions, and even our sense of reality, are being shaped by the very machines we have created?
The artist’s original prompt used to generate this work remains undisclosed.
Exhibitions
• UNRELEASED MATERIALS, 6th International Triennial of Expanded Media, Art Pavilion Cvijeta Zuzorić, Belgrade, 2022
• GUI/GOOEY, Plexus Project online exhibition, curated by Laura Splan, New York, 2023
• Transhumance, CON-TEMPORARY Art Observatorium (CTAO), Lavagna, Italy, 2023