Join us on Wednesday October 9th, 16.00-18.00, at Borough Road Gallery (103 Borough Road, LSBU) for a presentation by Martin Zeilinger entitled Generative AI & Concept Art: Mean Images in the Creative Industries. All welcome.
This talk tracks ongoing research regarding the highly polarised perception of generative AI tools among concept artists in the creative industries. In the digital entertainment industry, concept art is framed by pressures to produce material that is highly original, but which can often also be described as utterly generic. To convey ideas for viable new commercial entertainment products, concept art tends to invoke successful existing work. Many concept artists are militantly opposed to generative AI – but could it also be said that their creative domain, because of how it ‘scrapes’ the cultural mainstream in the production of new work, shares some conceptual and operational similarities with generative AI? For our discussion, I will use the concept of the ‘mean image’ as a jumping-off point for exploring both the nature of concept art and the rhetorics of recent anti-AI campaigns.
Martin Zeilinger is a researcher and curator of digital art. His work explores critical and experimental uses of emerging technologies including AI and blockchain, with a focus on intellectual property issues, tactical practices, decentralisation, and new forms of digital commons. Martin is Reader in Computational Arts & Technology at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, and the author of Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property (meson press 2021). https://marjz.net/
Preliminary reading: Chapter 3 of Martin’s book, “(Dis)Locating Creativity, Agency, and Property in AI” (pp. 57-75). The book is fully Open Access, and available on the publisher’s website at https://meson.press/books/tactical-entanglements/.