
Art Intelligence: AI’s Impact on Creators
Presented by Gray Area
Date & Time:
Saturday, April 22, 2023
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location:
Art Market San Francisco Theater
This special session organized by cultural incubator Gray Area brings together leading experts and developers in the field of artificial intelligence in conversation with artists and thinkers grappling with AI tools. Since free-to-use text-to-image and text chat AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion have become more widely available, their use has exploded. Artists have been able to scale up their practices in unprecedented ways by collaborating with AI to generate and curate outputs. At the same time, AI imaging and chat have complicated what we thought we knew about artistic relationships with technology. A number of questions emerge from this context: how do we define authorship when so much of the creative process is delegated to machines? Where does artistic agency intersect with algorithmic autonomy? And what does a proliferation of AI-produced images mean for the future of digital culture? Join us as we unpack the complicated entanglements of AI and artists working today.
Niki Selken, Manager of Design Strategy, Intuit, is an artist, technologist and educator. Niki spent over a decade working across game design, physical computing, experimental theatre, interaction design and education. As a designer and technologist, Niki focused on working with nonprofits and small businesses in the inclusion and social impact space (Ms. Foundation, Girls Write Now, LYRIC, Hesperian Health Guides) and as an educator, she taught a range of creative coding courses in both New York and San Francisco. A graduate of Parsons School of Design, Niki has taught at her alma mater, at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, at the University of San Francisco, at the Bay Area Video Collective and at Gray Area—where she was the Creative Development Director and managed the artist incubator and creative code education programs. Niki’s work has been featured by Yahoo Tech, Buzzfeed, Make Magazine and Adafruit, among others. Niki identifies as Latina and hails from a long line of Mexican artists and craftsmen.
Brandie Nonnecke, Director, CITRIS Policy Lab & Associate Research Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley: Brandie Nonnecke, PhD is Founding Director of the CITRIS Policy Lab, headquartered at UC Berkeley. She is an Associate Research Professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP) where she directs the Tech Policy Initiative, a collaboration between CITRIS and GSPP to strengthen tech policy education, research, and impact. Brandie is the Director of Our Better Web, a program that supports empirical research, policy analysis, training, and engagement to address the sharp rise of online harms. She is a co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at Berkeley Law. She also co-directs the UC Berkeley AI Policy Hub, an interdisciplinary initiative training researchers to develop effective AI governance and policy frameworks.Her research has been featured in Science, Wired, NPR, BBC News, MIT Technology Review, Buzzfeed News, among others. Her research articles, op-eds, and presentations are available at nonnecke.com.
Xiaochen Yang, Artist, UX Designer, Researcher: Xiaochen Yang “XY” is a media artist, designer with a background in visual design, and generative research. Her multi-disciplinary practice explores the in-between space across fine art, tangible media, and speculative narratives. As a Product Designer working with conversational AI, she’s interested in inventing new systems and design paradigms with emerging technologies. Her past work includes working with Intel Research on the future landscape of autonomous driving and serving as a strategist at TBWA/Chiat/Day media arts lab. She has received awards internationally from The OneShow Design Awards, non-profit organizations WWF(World Wide Fund for Nature) and iGem(International Genetically Engineered Machine), etc. She graduated with MFA in Media Design Practices from Art Center College of Design.
Delta_Ark (Ari Kalinowski): Delta_Ark is an experimental atelier that explores climate change, artificial intelligence and the future. The studio draws influence from the Jewish mystical tradition, ecological movements, transhumanist philosophy, post-cyberpunk literature, manga and anime, Japanese poetry, post-industrial music from China, game-based art and social practice. Repeated themes include income inequality, climate apocalypse, ecomodernism, ecological transition, biotech paradises, machine ecologies, robotic cities, mind uploading, artificial superintelligence, morphological liberty and queer culture/romance. Repeated technical forms include artificial life, artificial agents, virtual evolution, virtual worlds, text in virtual worlds, natural language processing, poems, archives, architecture, light-based art and performance.
Image Credits: From Delta_Ark’s AI Game Binah