OpenAI announced Friday a New York City art gallery collaboration that gives artists access to unreleased artificial intelligence tools.
The exhibit, a series called “Strada Nuova: New Road” on view at Strada Gallery will run for three weeks and centers on a “diverse group of artists [that] is curated to consist of brilliant researchers, academics, and creators working between physical and digital artwork,” according to Strada founder Paul Hill.
Hill told CNBC he reached out to OpenAI to suggest the project. Talks began about six months ago and the plan came together with OpenAI offering artists access to tools including its Sora video generator, its Voice Engine voice generator, its DALL-E 3 image generator and ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, as well as educational resources and artist stipends.
Minne Atairu, an interdisciplinary artist who has specialized in using AI in art for the past four years — before ChatGPT even launched — uses image generation, both 2D and 3D, as well as video generation in her art to highlight “understudied gaps” in Black historical archives. For this exhibit, she said she used Sora to create an AI-generated video, “Regina Gloriana,” inspired by supernatural horror films produced in Nigeria in the 1990s.
The use of AI in art, in many forms, is part of a wide-ranging debate that has generated heaps of controversy — and an increasing number of lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement and training data.
Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup, was recently hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by three authors over alleged copyright infringement. Last year, a group of prominent U.S. authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement in using their work to train ChatGPT. And last January, a group of artists filed a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt over alleged copyright infringement by their AI image-generation tools.
When asked about the use of AI in art, Strada’s Hill told CNBC, “I think on the controversy level, all good artworks are controversial. I’ve never seen a good artwork that isn’t. Only the bad ones that lack importance or significance are the ones that nobody talks about.”
Hill added that across different industries, he views AI development as an industrial revolution of sorts.
“Historically speaking, the communities and networks that are the last to receive these tools are typically Black folks,” Hill said, adding, “This next industrial revolution, we can kind of be like the pioneers, making sure that marginalized communities are not the last to receive them. This exhibition, six of the artists are black; one is from Kyoto, Japan.”
Some of Hill’s artists echoed the sentiment about not being left behind, regarding access to AI tools or representation within them.
Curry Hackett, a transdisciplinary designer and public artist, told CNBC he uses AI to rethink how images can be created and sourced. His project for the exhibit builds on one of his public art projects, “Ugly Beauties,” in which he used Midjourney to manually collage images together for a 50-foot-long scene suspended in a Brooklyn plaza, “to speculate on Black relationships with nature and plants,” he said. For the Strada exhibit, that same work is suspended in the gallery, and Hackett used Sora to animate the still canvas scenes.
“I realize that there are environmental concerns and political concerns, there are ethical concerns, but I also think that there’s something real about opening pathways to create creative media,” Hackett said of AI. “And as a black artist, it’s not a given that our forms of media will show up in these models. So there’s a case to be made that underprioritized groups should actually be actively using these tools in imaginative ways.”
Hackett also said, “I could definitely understand, however, a lot of the concerns that a lot of folks in creative fields are feeling right now, because there are concerns that the models are being trained on data without consent… I think we’re just in a moment where we need to develop norms and best practices so that people are actually comfortable using these tools.”
Sophia Wilson, a photographer and visual artist, works primarily with film photography hand-printed in a color darkroom. She told CNBC she was already adept at Photoshop and other retouching software, and that’s how she thinks of AI tools like Sora.
“Nothing’s perfect and there are downsides to everything, but if I’m able to use it for my own gain as an artist… I look at it as more of a retouching tool or an editing tool that enhances my work, rather than something that I should be afraid of, because I just don’t want to be part of the crowd that gets left behind in history,” Wilson said.
For the Strada exhibit, Wilson documented Black women bodybuilders in New York, and she used Sora to animate some of her still images, such as a chandelier shifting in the wind. She also used OpenAI’s Voice Engine to read some of the transcribed interviews with the subjects.
“AI is reading the story as an audio part accompaniment,” Wilson said. “It sets everyone on an even playing ground. Black women get judged a lot for — women in general, but especially Black women — for their voices and different inflections… I wanted it to come from a uniform voice, where you can’t judge people based on their voices.”