Can AI do art?
Long before artificial intelligence was used so ubiquitously, you could buy art at the DIY store, pictures for the wall, neatly framed, to match any living room light. Art and AI are just decoration here, because decoration is a need. But anyone who expects more from art than just a splash of color is asking about meaning, origin, attitude and the question of whether artificial intelligence is merely copying art or enriching it. When self-driving cars drive us around one day, there will be racetracks where people will be allowed to hold the steering wheel in their own hands. If lab-grown meat becomes the norm, some people will choose real meat for special occasions, out of tradition, out of ritual. This is precisely where the parallels with art and AI lie. Inspiration and imitation have always been a part of it, students copy masters, styles wander through eras, quotes become dialogs and today artificial intelligence and art mix.
The eternal question of original and imitation
Today, AI does nothing fundamentally different, only faster, broader and more efficient when it comes to patterns, visual language and art. It recognizes patterns, combines them and matches what we think is handwriting with astonishing precision. The impression can be confusingly genuine and yet for many there remains a clear distinction between AI and human art. The knowledge of the struggle, the intention, the risk a human takes when transforming an idea into something visible remains part of the art. It is the small imperfection that we feel, the breath that hangs on the edge of a line. Art as a mere form can be imitated, art as a realized fantasy less so. We measure value not only by the result, but by the path to it, by context and consistency, and ask ourselves what role artificial intelligence plays in this path. The question therefore remains not “who makes it more beautiful”, but “who stands for what”, whether the answer comes from a human, from AI or from a combination of both.
The topic of my show keynote
I play out this conflict in my show, a performance about art and artificial intelligence. Suddenly there is music from offstage, it sounds like Beethoven. I tell them that the composition was written by an AI and raise my iPad so that everyone can see the glowing surface. Now I let Vincent van Gogh ‘s famous Starry Night appear live, but over the city we are in, a scene of art that is rearranged by AI. Stuttgart, Hamburg, Zurich, the skyline adapts. The blue ripples, the moon shimmers in that typical teardrop and below, the skyscrapers of the present grow out of the brushstrokes of another century. I explain that as a human being I remain the artist, because I wield the artificial intelligence like a paintbrush, because I select, finish, discard, because I am responsible for the result. At that moment, a digital paintbrush emerges from the display and floats in the air above the tablet. I have developed my own hologram technique for this, which leaves the audience speechless for a moment. Then the brush physically appears in my hand, a leap from the virtual to the real, a bridge between AI-supported image generation and handmade art. I go on to explain that artificial intelligence is also capable of generating images without my instructions, of independently combining patterns that we call art. People make art because they can, but above all because it expands their horizons. At this moment, the stars detach themselves from the digital painting, step out of the display into the room and hover above the display again. The number ends not with a proof, but with a question: what exactly makes the difference in art when the result is so similar, whether the result comes from AI or humans, or whether both create new art together.
The future of art and artificial intelligence
I leave it open in the show, but I do have an opinion on the role of artificial intelligence in art. Machines can imitate art, but they don’t want anything. AI does not pursue an interest, it optimizes targets. What it lacks is not skill, but compassion, the experience of risking something by leaving a mark on the world. Human artists draw from biography, body, time, from belonging and contradiction, from joy and loss. That is why works carry meanings that point beyond what is found. Innovation often arises where we break a pattern instead of just varying it, where we consciously break a rule and suffer the consequences. Artificial intelligence remains strong in the combinatorics of the existing, even if its results seem fresh. The value of art also arises in the social space, in studio discussions, in criticism, in scandal, in consolation, in looking at the same canvas together. Even small imperfections, the audible breath of a musician, a tone that has matured too long, a spot that has been painted over, become the signature of the presence of the human being and distinguish human art from machine-produced material.
This does not mean that AI has to remain a foreign body in art. On the contrary, artificial intelligence can be a workshop, a search engine for associations, a supplier of scores, a source of light with which we can explore spaces that were previously hidden from us. The crucial thing is not to reveal every detail of the creative process, but to find ways of making it clear that a work has not been created solely by machine calculation. Those who integrate artificial intelligence into their practice will automatically develop their own ways of marking this human trace so that the art remains recognizable as a human activity. This can be a deliberate imperfection, a personal commentary or the integration of live elements such as a video, a performance or manual interventions in an AI-generated image. All of this is intended to show that a person was at work here who wanted more than just a result.
In this way, the “why” remains tangible and the technology, whether AI or another tool, really serves the message of the art. Perhaps art today is less a collection of skills than an attitude towards the world, an attitude that integrates both human experience and artificial intelligence. In this understanding, AI expands our horizons when we consciously guide it rather than letting it take the lead. Artificial intelligence in art can enrich, provoke and pose new questions. Art remains the question of why and AI becomes an accompanying instrument on this path.
