Artificial intelligence is increasingly carving out a place for itself in the visual arts. Software is now able to generate images from a simple sentence or a series of prompts. The results are striking, but the use of such programs raises many questions about the future of creation and creativity. We look at the phenomenon in our latest After Calendar, our trend book for 2023.
In 1901, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright gave a speech in Chicago on the role of the machine in the creative process. He explained that “its function [was] ultimately [to] "emancipate human expression." A century later, this “machine” takes the form of artificial intelligence (AI). It is capable of creating any image from a textual description – text prompts – in a few seconds. Would you like to see the English naturalist Sir David Attenborough fighting a polar bear with his bare hands? Or American-Canadian actor Dwayne Johnson meeting his alter ego, The Rock? It's now possible thanks to software such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Imagen, DreamBooth and Stable Diffusion.