Throughout Tech Week, News 8 is publishing a five-part series on the role of AI in various industries. For full Tech Week coverage, click here.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A major topic at Tech Week Grand Rapids this year is AI, including the place it has — or doesn’t have — in art.
On Wednesday, Jarran Fountain, director of programs at Lions and Rabbits Center for the Arts, will moderate a conversation on how AI is transforming the creative process.
“We’re going to be talking about the concerns, what are some of the ethical and moral obligations while we’re working with it,” he said. “In addition, how do we use it as a tool? And what is the positivity within AI?”
On Friday, several faculty members from Western Michigan University will talk about how humans and AI can collaborate in the AI process.
“Not everybody on our panel is interested in using AI,” said Jacklyn Brickman, assistant professor and co-coordinator of kinetic imaging at the Gwen Frostic School of Art of WMU, who will moderate the WMU panel. “Not everybody on the panel thinks that it’s ultimately a positive thing. And so that’s really important to the discussion, because this is not a one-angled topic, right? A lot of people feel very, very heated and very passionate about it.”
Fountain said a lot of artists working with Lions and Rabbits, based in the city of Wyoming, have expressed concern about their art being used for AI and many would like to see laws or regulations put into place to ensure their artwork isn’t taken.
Others are concerned that AI could take work from artists.
“People are worried that AI is going to … take their job or take away the creative aspects, that it won’t be as human,” Whitney Allred, the chief of marketing at Nexi Agency, who will be speaking on the panel with Fountain, said.
Brickman said while some in creative spaces see AI as a tool, others see it as a hindrance. She said she isn’t worried about it taking away jobs from artists, but she is concerned about the environmental impact AI can have.
“My bigger concern about AI is how the computing power that’s necessary to run it,” she said. “Environmentally speaking, the energy that goes into creating artificial intelligent responses is astronomical and so that is detrimental to our natural resources. And I think that that’s a bigger concern that we need to contend with.”
Still, while artists contend with some of those concerns, they’re still finding ways to use AI to help with the creative process. Allred said AI can be a great tool to help when dealing with creative block and to help get inspiration.
On Friday, WMU faculty will discuss some of the ways they’ve used AI as a tool, like a project Eric Souther, assistant professor of kinetic imaging, and Kelsey Paschich, assistant professor of innovation in dance, are working on.
“They have been working with a motion capture suit to record data from Kelsey’s choreography and then applying real time artificial intelligent images and video actually to that motion capture data,” Brickman explained. “The movement is informed by Kelsey, but the imagery comes from AI and data.”
She compared using AI to using paint, saying AI can be used as an artistic tool.
“When you squeeze paint out onto a palette, you still have to move it around the canvas,” she said. “It’s very similar with AI. You put in a set of prompts, that’s your paint, right? But you have to figure out how you’re going to move it around that digital canvas. … It’s something to constantly challenge, but it also does not remove the human from the picture.”
While there are still lots of questions around AI and art, she said part of an artist’s work can be experimenting with it.
“It’s not made for us, ultimately. There are some wonderful tools for artistic creation, but really these tools are made for other things,” she said. “The artist’s job is to experiment with it and see what it can do that it’s not meant to do, and so that’s the fun part for us. And I think as long as (the AI) industry keeps evolving, artists will keep experimenting with what’s next.”
