Now Live: A TED Talk by Eileen Isagon Skyers 🎥
Now Live: A TED Talk by Eileen Isagon Skyers 🎥
Where human and machine creativity meet.
Gemma co-founder and curator Eileen Isagon Skyers' TED talk, "In the age of AI art, what can originality look like?" debuts today on TED.com. The talk showcases artwork from Mario Klingemann, Sara Ludy, Ivona Tau, Sofia Crespo, and Claire Silver.
As part of this special release, Skyers has curated a new edition by Gemma Founding Artist Ivona Tau, a pioneering voice in the AI Art movement. Read Skyers’ curatorial essay (an adaptation of the presentation), and mint the artwork below.
Today, we’ve witnessed machine learning models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney give birth to all kinds of imagery, from bizarre life forms, to imagined landscapes and surreal influencers. Our continued fascination with AI lies in its enigmatic nature: we are compulsively drawn to the mysteries we cannot fully grasp. Neural networks are able to process data from thousands of images in an instant—spanning different eras, cultures, and art movements to produce visuals that are so familiar, yet, somehow, strikingly foreign. These images tend to reflect human nature, but they also confound us.Â
Because AI has become such a defining industrial and technical paradigm, we need to understand our encounter with AI Art as more than a purely aesthetic experience.Â
But how does one begin to evaluate such a groundswell of algorithmically reproduced imagery? We could observe the multiple datasets fed to a single large language model (LLM). Or we could, instead, look toward artists who offer new metaphors, ideas, and narrative interpretations that grant us a small glimpse into the profound possibilities of our individual interaction with this technology.
We are all now co-creating with AI. The images, photos, and memories that we share become its language, information, and data. This technology alone will not move us toward dystopia or utopia. But if artists can show us how to be more conscious of its use cases, unveiling what is often left unseen, then perhaps they can show us how to innovate alongside them.Â
The outcomes of machine learning are shifting how we create and relate to each other, what we value, and how we understand aesthetic imagery. If we want to be a part of these worlds that we cannot design alone—if we want to better understand these new kinds of images and predictions, then looking at the varied approaches of artists who are pushing the boundaries of AI is a very productive place to start. We need to brace ourselves for an increasingly technological future, which will only multiply the creative possibilities we have at our fingertips today.
– Eileen Isagon Skyers
About Gemma
Gemma is an emerging community co-inhabited by artists, curators, and contributors with a shared vision for how culture can shape our future. This summer Gemma is releasing weekly open editions from our Founding Artists, which you can mint now. Subscribe and follow us on Instagram and Twitter to be notified about new releases.