AI Am I?

"AI Am I?" is a series of artworks dreamed up by an AI and produced in real life by the artist or others. A series of carefully curated "start texts" are fed into a text generation AI called GPT, which then outputs text that includes a description of an imaginary artwork, along with analysis of that artwork and other supporting text. Usually, a creative idea is conceived by a human and rendered with the help of technology. This series turns that notion on its head and represents a human–machine collaboration.

Computational creativity is a rapidly growing field that is poised to disrupt the current creative workflow and expand the definition of what creativity can be. I hope the project will help people see that AI is still at its very earliest stages of developing a sense of creativity. I want people to understand that AI is still very much a tool that helps humans make decisions, rather than being a replacement for human creativity.

I was originally going to name the series "Algorithmically-Generated Imaginary Art" but I felt it was a little wordy. I went with "AI Am I? The New Aesthetic." since I liked the idea of asking a question about the human-machine collaboration behind this project. The new aesthetic is the state of being where we can no longer distinguish what is natural from what is artificial.

All of the preceding text, after the first paragraph, as well as the series title, was written by the GPT AI.

Works in the series include A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night — attributed to a fictional artists' collective and realized as a row of modified toilet plungers — and Dreams of the Cheese-Faced Gentleman, for which GPT-4 developed the description of an imagined painting, a commissioned painter rendered it in oil, and a multimodal model then studied the finished canvas to write its museum-style wall label.