Writings on AI
APRIL 21ST, 2026
I've been collecting some things I'm finding on AI (mostly on Instagram) directed towards some practice/research. Sharing here for discussion but also curious if anyone has found other interesting/challenging (unique) writing about AI.
For my part, my perspective on AI in art, I'm not interested in the knee-jerk reactions from artists that AI art is not real art (occurring at the same time as a rise in craft). It can be real art. There is a lot of crap being produced because it's easy and because artists aren't producing it. It both slips under the guise of everyone is an artist (I don't forgive Beuys for that), they are not, and everything creative is art, it's not. I don't say these things out of meanness but good artists take years to become good. It involves a lot of work of all different types, they are post-disciplinarity exemplified and get little recognition for this. Good art can take any form, any form, and nothing about AI art excludes it from this. Whether an artist works with paint, clay, stone, code, electronics, light, time or so many other things too numerous to list here there is a concept, there is knowledge, there is work. The battle cry we hear from the anti-AI artists, that it's not created by people, comes from a misinformed position. There is always a person, a human, coding the AI, compiling a dataset to train it, coding a Lora to style it, designing a workflow to direct it. And besides, if we truly are entering a post-human, post-anthropocene, era - one that is now being gradually positioned as not an era without humans but one that is not human centric - are we going to abandon art because it can only be made by humans?
The Prompt Engineer Is the Artist of Our Age - https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-prompt-engineer-is-the-artist-of-our-age/
All Media is Training Data, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst (link to some images of this book - https://shop.serpentinegalleries.org/products/holly-herndon-mat-dryhurst-all-media-is-training-data) - anyone read this book?
AI choirs: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst on data training as art-making - https://www.artbasel.com/stories/ai-holly-herndon-mat-dryhurst-data-training-art-making
AI in Art: Is it a Threat, a Tool, or Are We Asking the Wrong Question? - https://artit.net/spotlight/376
Post-Digital Craft Is Not Nostalgia - https://criticalplayground.org/post-digital-craft-is-not-nostalgia/?utm_campaign=feed&utm_medium=bio&utm_source=instagram
peripheral forms
A space for organizing aesthetic resistance at the periphery.