As part of Format’s ongoing editorial series on Artificial Intelligence we’re tackling the most pressing questions like the potential of creative collaboration with AI.
Artist Tiffany April explores how new technology intersects with established practices, forging new paths for creatives.
The Rise of AI in the Creative Toolkit
A few months ago, my mother got a new phone and was thrilled with the built in AI drawing app– she could scrawl a quick line doodle and it would magically transform into a plethora of styles; Art Deco stick man on boat, Pop Art stick man on boat, Baroque stick man on boat. I took it as another clear sign that Artificial Intelligence has begun to move from a ground-breaking advancement to a novel, every-day assistant in our daily lives. It’s now ever-present in our apps, writing tools, and creative softwares like Photoshop and Canva. For many, AI equates to entertainment and efficiency; access to an ability to create at the push of a button.
For artists, there is expansive use of applications; AI can function as a creative brainstorming assistant in the form of text-to-image generative softwares like ChatGPT, Midjourney, DALL-E, ArtListio and Deep Dream Generator (c. 2015). In the modeling softwares TouchDesigner, Processing, and Blender, it sets a foundation for world-building in code-based, generative visuals and interactive installations.
Artists have responded to this incursion of AI into creative works with a gamut of emotion: anger, fear, worry, acceptance, excitement–all of them valid, because as with any tool, it’s the application and intent that determines the meaning and impact.
In this article I’ll be exploring the collaborative relationships artists can have with this new tool. Artists who set out with the intention to use it to advance their concepts.
Human-Machine Collaboration in Art: Case Studies
AI’s learning patterns, functional limitations and mimicry of the textures, natural formations, and linguistic structures of reality, are leaping off points for the collaborative intervention of human creativity. Artists, such as Mario Klingemann and Refik Anadol, emphasize the background process of AI and generative technologies to reveal existential and alternative environmental, philosophical, social and political world views.
Pioneering AI artist Mario Klingemann and painter Alberto Barqué-Duran were key early explorers of AI as a creative partner and tool for inspiration. In their project “My Artificial Muse” (2017), Barqué-Duran painted a large scale oil painting of a fictitious muse generated from an AI neural network developed and trained by Klingemann using art-historical references. Their process questioned whether the intimate relationship between artist and muse could translate to a fully virtual machine-generated figure.
Contemporary artists have been utilizing AI’s revolutionary ability to synthesize mass amounts of data to reveal dimensions of our world otherwise too overwhelming for the human mind to process by converting this data into visual, sound-based and haptic experiences. A pioneering figure in this area is Refik Anadol, who works with large data-sets and archives of information, compiling and reformatting them through AI neural networks into complex, continually shifting visuals.
In “Echoes of the Earth: A Living Archive” (2024), Anadol stitched together an incomprehensible wave of information from LIDAR and photogrammetry imagery sourced from coral reef and rainforest archives into digestible highspeed reels of speculative generative evolution. The results were continuous flows of rapidly morphing imagined species and environments mimicking the patterns, textures and forms of life on earth.
Artists are also using AI and coded systems to visualize the presence of non-human living beings and elemental systems through plant signals, sound waves, and non-verbal, sensory-based communication. In Yunchul Kim’s linked kinetic sculptures “Chroma V” and “Argos–Swollen Suns”, clusters of glasstube sensors in “Argos–Swollen Suns” flash when subatomic particles are detected, triggering the undulating movement of the iridescent scales covering the serpentine form of “Chroma V” across the gallery.
Mona Safari’s SYMBIONT project uses pairs of SYMBIONTs—soft-robotic, starfish-like forms with silicone textured exteriors—to translate and exchange human touch and vital signals from one SYMBIONT into heart beats, vibrations, or crawling motions in the other. Her human-computer interaction design explores the similarities between human and other-than-human sensory communication and elevates the relevance and presence of non-verbal connection within natural ecosystems.
Equally important are the artists who point a finger at what AI non posso do. Artists like Jake Elwes e Charlie Tapp expose AI’s technical and creative shortcomings–from the shaky illusion of fake media to algorithms that flatten complex musical harmonies. Stephanie Dinkins highlights the critical issue of racialized representation gaps in data collection, creating space for marginalized perspectives overlooked by biased AI systems. Similarly, the collective zzyw sidelines the algorithmic echo-chambers of social media by prioritizing systems that organize information outside of the closed-loop of predictive content.
Each of these artists, whether foregrounding AI’s processing capacity or mimicry of reality and human ability, are melding the tool of AI to serve their own creative research.
Acknowledging the Existential Anxiety of AI Art
The leading concern around AI is that it devalues human skilled labour by replacing it with hollow facsimiles. Writers, designers and even models—now being replaced by fully AI generated composites—face the reality of shrinking job sectors. AI’s impinging presence is driving heightened frustration with our attention economy, as it swarms our online spaces with vapid AI ‘slop’ and deepfakes. Just yesterday, my partner said we should add “Mind Cage (2025)” to our watch list. It turned out to be an AI fake. And there are also the ethical and copyright issues around training of AI on artists’ artworks and the use of deep-fake likeness (“Mind Cage” supposedly features Angelina Jolie, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy).
There has always been resistance to major technological shifts, from the invention of the automobile, the telephone, and the printing press to photography. Horse-and-buggy cab drivers probably had a lot to say about the invention of the car. These seismic shifts in daily life rewrite our narrative of reality, change our values, and lead to major shake ups to the labour force. Technological development becomes terrifying when it threatens the worth of your individual creative contribution to society. However, these changes are a consistent aspect of human history and have offered us the possibility to see new dimensions of our world.
Karl Blossfeldt’s microscopic botanical photographs of the 1900s brought plant morphology into a whole new light. Early film, video, and digital art ushered in the era of dissecting our experience of reality through camera angles, cuts, and the manipulation of electromagnetic and digital signals in time-based narratives.
Video artist Nam June Paik’s “TV Magnets” (1960s), used large magnets placed on top of televisions to disrupt the T.V.’s electronic imagery into abstract warping light forms. Greg Hill’s video piece “Finestre” (1978), converted black-and-white video recordings in real-time using an analog-to-digital synthesizer resulting in the original imagery’s pixelated disintegration in painterly, psychedelic colour palettes. Paik and Hill utilized the technology available to them to let us see the world through the ‘eyes’ of digital and computer data; where pixels and numbers define colour, motion and geometric space, and visual representations are fluid and unstable.
Just as each of these technological shifts revealed new perspectives of our reality, inaccessible by human perception and craft-related skill alone, AI/generative art is allowing us to visualize data on a scale far beyond the capacity of the human brain. These softwares are reinvigorating Walter Benjamin’s dilemma of the aura and the roles of originality and influence within authenticity; and by extension, a questioning of whether the existential dilemma of AI art is not the aura of the object, but the aura of the artist and creativity itself.
Originality vs. Influence: Rethinking Creativity in the Age of AI
In my own work, I highlight the flimsiness of the imagined boundaries between human and more-than-human beings by foregrounding the agency of technology, organic life, and elemental forces. For this reason, I find it important to explore perché these advancements create a backlash in myself, and how I can deconstruct them.
Systems like ChatGPT learn and generate from internal memory banks in the same way that we do. When experiencing a creative block in art school, I would return to collage, a means to access my well of meaningful personal and cultural symbology and spark a flow of subconscious free-association stemming from the books, films, artworks, historical moments, memories, video games, and music absorbed throughout my lifetime.
Similar to the hive mind shared by ants and bees, humans hold a collective unconscious at the core of how we learn and create, one that is fuelled by a set of cultural and social frameworks that guide our thought patterns and goals. AI could be considered a heightened version of our hive mind; a massive hard drive storing human knowledge, memory, and resources, which gives us unique creative access to our collected culture. Many of the artists I’ve mentioned spark a deeper questioning of how we define creativity. Can the pattern-based creations of AI be considered art? And if so, is the artist the human or the machine? Jerry Saltz’ review of Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised” exhibition at MoMA (2023) captured one perspective on these sentiments, with Saltz’s scathing comments comparing the piece to a glorified lava lamp.
For me, as an artist, the key point of difference between human creativity and that of AI is the comparison of generated images and dream imagery. AI and humans learn similarly, and our creative output is shaped by our collective personal memories, often subconsciously. However, AI is not objectively ‘creative’ in the same way that humans are.
It can learn to form patterns between stimuli; for example, associating the prompt of stick person drawing and ‘muse’ with a specific set of characteristics that it can pull from to create an image. Similar to our dreamscapes, where our minds connect feelings with visual representations, for instance; anxiety = spiders. However, human creativity can think outside of the parameters of patterns presented to it, and consciously rework and combine influences and inspirations with meaningful intention. AI can only mimic the action of creativity.
As for the question of the role of the artist; is collaborating with AI any different than the dynamics of interactive computer art of the 1980-90s? Or socially engaged relational aesthetic performances? Both relied on direct participation and feedback from human audiences and placed the creative system of the artist in conversation with an external input. The outcome or meaning created by the work was not entirely in the artists’ hands.
Artist and theorist Margot Lovejoy, in addressing this shift in creative dynamic, stated that in collaborative work the artist becomes “an agent who does not create specific images, but instead, creates novel processes for generating new images and experiences.”
Working with digital rendering softwares or AI generative neural networks is just another means of creation that positions the artist in the role of facilitator. AI finds and follows patterns, it doesn’t think conceptually about the art it’s creating. There is still a necessary collaboration between the artist who leads and the AI that follows.
AI Resources for Expanding Your Creative Practice
If you’re interested in using AI to expand your creative work and creative work, there are some worthwhile places to share and discuss AI practices. Below is a list of tutorials and online community resources that I’ve found helpful in navigating digital rendering softwares.
Want to learn more about the complex relationship between AI and Art? Read these thought-provoking articles from our experts:
AI & Your Art: A Guide to Copyright and Protecting Your Work
The AI Paradox: How Artificial Intelligence is Reshaping Art
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Tiffany April is a visual artist using painting, assemblage, and digital-based installations to capture the transitory and mutually affective relationship between human and more-than-human beings, both digital and (im)material. Informed by research into the interrelations between human and non-human biology, morphology, evolution and ecology, April considers the human body as a continuum between the ecological and digital to question categorizations of “Otherness”; an exploration rooted in her embodied experience as a queer and neurodiverse individual. April uses sensuality and simplicity of forms woven in space to decenter identifiers of the human and place the sensing body on the same plane as the technological and the organic. She completed her MFA at the University of Ottawa, and her BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University.
