CHRIS THURMAN: When AI threatens perceptions of the value of the arts
The artists of now occupy a world in which the human is no longer unquestionably at the centre of creative practice
Artists and designers facing difficult decisions about whether to embrace or resist the incursion of AI into the process of creating images — and if so, how — may find themselves turning to the past to consider how their predecessors responded to technological developments. One wonders, for example, what figures like Làszló Moholy-Nagy would have said or made if they were alive today.
Moholy-Nagy was an artist and professor in the Bauhaus school in Weimar (a Hungarian Jew, he left Germany for England and the US when the Nazis came to power). Working in photography, collage, painting, sculpture and film, and pioneering new forms such as light art, he was also a tech enthusiast. It is tempting to imagine Moholy-Nagy experimenting with Midjourney or other AI image generators...
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