AI and Creativity: Excavating the future from the present

Rachel Falconer, the chair of judges for the SOLO AI Awards that recognise the use of artificial intelligence in artistic and creative work, explores the contingencies, potential and precarity of human and non-human collaboration and creative output.

The SOLO AI Film Awards is positioned to critically reflect on new patterns and modes of authorship through cinematic expression and beyond.  The awards' pulling focus is on the amorphous, contingent nature of human and non-human collaborative narrative strategies, structures, and outputs as they are placed in dialogue with AI and machine learning regimes.  

Creative practitioners and artists have been working with AI for decades as active co-conspirators and collaborators, but the popular adoption and mass dissemination of tools such as ChatGPT, Jasper, Runway and Midjourney have produced a tsunami of outputs that have been disseminated as cultural artefacts spanning the gamma of white cube spaces and NFT contraband, with mixed and circumspect reception from the artworld at large.  

Rather, it is designed to leave us with an unsettling, probing vision and investigation of our maturing digital consciousness – leaking unseen glitches, biases, and irregularities into our new modes of consuming, producing and co-authoring stories and cinematic narratives.   

By foregrounding artists and creative strategies that address the issues this new collaborative space engenders, the SOLO AI award instigates public discourse around the very real prospect of a revised, more nuanced attitude to the integration of creative AI within culture and society untethered from the reeling between utopic and dystopic binaries.

The shortlisted artists all share an expanded approach to narrative building in direct dialogue with AI; relaying a circuit of relational and reflective feedback looping continuously between the acts of prompting and remixing. As one engages with the nebulous aesthetic patterning and irregularly shaped filmic narratives of the nominated artwork, a sense of integrated, almost seamless machinic-human co-creation comes to the fore. These are not the highly polished surrealist dreams of Philip K Dick’s Electronic Sheep but an uncomfortable and uneven re-presentation of translation in motion. Narratives crafted through the co-mingling of hybrid machinic-human authorship here have moments of crude revealing of the ghost in the machine but also high-fidelity instances of a truly new and innovative language of storytelling that manages to be located firmly of this world but also float just above, slightly, and generatively removed.  

In our digital milieu, where operational images, technologies of dissemination and machinic co-creation comprise our common lexicon, the relationship between “the work” and author has come under terse scrutiny, particularly when analysing the AI and generative art genre. The attribution of creative agency to the machine that some artists working in the field aspire to, and the consequent bestowing of authorship to the certificate of authenticity that occupies the same value as “the work” itself has a well-trodden lineage. Tracking back to work claiming the position of this relationship with authorship such as Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawing #793B Certificate and his claim that “ the idea becomes a machine that makes the art” is a clear case in point.  A more recent example of this is the live coding movement where the idea is then transformed into a set of computational instructions that then is performed as a live – the idea becoming the machine that makes the work.  

As we shift through the complex relationship with the histories of the fusion of AI and creative practice,  its artists and collectives such as Crosslucid, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Goldsmiths alumni Memo Akten and Anna Ridler bear testament to the maturing of this terrain. Crafting their own data sets and training scenarios and refuting the torrid association with dominant correlations of bias riddled big data, mimetic banal aesthetic affectation, and reductive conceptual surfacing to their advantage these artists engage with these tensions to produce co-authored cultural offerings of a different kind.    

The SOLO AI Awards offers us a deep dive into probing the physical and psychological boundaries of hybrid authorship and technologically driven matter, undermining the dominant presentation of artificiality as a numbing agent, and teasing out the human qualities embedded within automatic processes of narration and storytelling. The work included in the shortlist represent a kind of reimaging of the constructs, assumptions, and expectations we place on computational systems of automation and generative storytelling. Through the dismantling of authorial stability via its relationship with both machinic systems and its community of co-authors, the SOLO Awards champion a more radical agency and create the space whereby the function and reach of generative art and its decentralized contingencies of aggregation and distribution are destined to produce new modes and patterning of algorithmic narratives and conceptual taste-making. Indeed, this may be the speculative roadmap ahead to finally fulfil the promise of art’s radical potential to redefine the art object itself away from medium specificity, aesthetic, or taste regimes.