Family albums and mosaics that never existed, butterfly women who will inexplicably save the Planet, and a free Iran in which one still wants to hope. While purely stochastically rearranging images of the past, in the hands of an artist generative artificial intelligence can become a powerful tool with which to impact the collective and personal vision of past and future..
Alongside the deep fakes, undeniably to be monitored, there are images created with the same technology but entirely different and jagged purposes, as only human desires and drives are. And they go to make up projects that can be fully considered as belonging to a new autonomous art. By embracing it as such, we give ourselves the chance to explore it with a soul unencumbered by castrating judgments, free to imagine, too, where it might take us and how. And to do so by listening to some pioneering protagonists.
TAKEAWAYS
IMAGINE THE PAST
1. Browsing through memories never experienced
In her “ Imagined Images “, Maria Mavropoulou, uses generative AI to create the family album that life never allowed her to have, due to multiple relocations, sometimes forced, sometimes for pleasure, leaving her with only oral histories. More than 400 frames depicting seven decades of stories, people, environments and different societies, through imperfect shots, awkward poses and forced smiles. “Shots” that evoke atmospheres of the same flavor as the dust covering chests of old photos found in the attic. Flipping through them, we can encounter a group of children sitting in front of a Christmas tree with their teacher in the background, the artist’s mother standing on a sunny, sandy beach with her two small children beside her and toys scattered everywhere, but also Mary herself, at 7-8 years old, dressed in pink, blowing out the candles of a birthday cake she never really tasted, in between moving house. As a child, she didn’t even notice, but as she grew up, as she tells it, “I felt disconnected-I was missing something important. So as soon as I started experimenting with the first text-to-image AI generators, it immediately clicked in me. I created the project using prompts that described familiar moments, such as dinners or birthdays, based on anecdotal stories about family stories and memories.”
“Imagined Images” has filled a void, reconstructing a version of the past that feels emotionally real, even if the images are not. They are not, partly because they “fish” in databases of images that persistently reflect a very “American” and stock style. “Very often it was difficult to create frames that did not reflect Western traditions. For my mother’s graduation from Moscow University in the 1980s, for example, I could not get a single image without the graduation gown and hat, which were never worn at that time and place.”
By adding time and place in the prompt, the outputs improved, Mavropoulou says, but what really left her speechless was seeing “unexpectedly accurate details pop up in the images that I had never provided, such as the exact uniform my mother wore to work, the pose of some of the subjects, the architectural styles…you get the exact atmosphere of the time.” Turning her attention away from the details, the artist herself later realized how “therapeutic” the project had become. In fact, it in a way allowed her to reconstruct a narrative that was also emotional, inviting her to explore “what if” scenarios, adding nonexistent images of those moments she wished she had experienced in childhood. “As a child, I never had a birthday party; therefore, I generated photos of celebrations that never occurred,” she says, “I partly reconciled with the moments of my past, experiencing a form of emotional closure. The bond with my mother has also changed, hearing some of her memories for the first time.”
Suspended between truth and fiction, Mavropoulou’s stills, while authentic in their emotional weight, remain the product of artificial intelligence’s interpretation of a large amount of data. She herself does not want to forget this and purposely coined the term “statistical truth,” because “while real photos are a means of preserving memories, these are the exact opposite, they are created by memories. Memories, however, are not solid, they can change over time, they become changeable, and I believe that the images produced from them retain this quality.” This is what transforms “Imagined Images” from a personal and intimate work to a universal creation that questions each of us about authenticity, memory and identity. “I challenge the traditional notion of truth, blurring the line between fact and fiction, I show how much the past has been constructed through editing, curating and, now, artificial intelligence, thus highlighting the therapeutic power of images,” he explains, “real or imagined, they help fill emotional gaps, offering a way to heal, reflect and reimagine personal stories that might otherwise be incomplete.
In those who have lost visual connection to the past due to war or displacement, they can elicit a sense of emotional healing, helping to restore a sense of belonging and identity, and to pass on a familiar narrative. “There remains, however, the risk of relying on these artificial memories in a naive way,” she stresses, “potentially distorting personal and collective histories. Mavropoulou is the first to perceive a strong need for awareness, responsibility and care, “not to manipulate our sense of history.” With the same awareness she has pursued the project; indeed, the desire is precisely to address ethical questions about the role of AI in shaping personal and collective narratives. The main “question” is “In a world where conflict, displacement and rising ideologies are reshaping people’s lives? What does it mean to be able to rewrite one’s life story with AI-generated images indistinguishable from reality?”
There is no ready and unequivocal answer: AI, as a new medium, has an impact on society that has yet to be fully explored. From artists, as they always have, since the word “image” itself comes from the Latin verb imitari, meaning “to copy or imitate,” to provide only a version of the truth, at best, even according to Aristotle [the term image comes from the Latin imāgō, imāginis, which has the meaning of “portrait,” “figure,” “appearance.” The etymology of the term is rooted in the Latin verb imitari, which means “to imitate,” suggesting the idea of something that reproduces or represents reality – ed.] And by society as a whole, aware of the need to maintain a level of cohesion and act collectively. Because “now that a new medium is on the rise, we have to adapt and it will take some time. More than the risk of being fooled by fake photos, according to an artist who has created hundreds of them, we should be frightened of the temptation to ignore the real ones, to choose which ones to believe based on our presumptions. But isn’t this already happening?
2. Traveling through space-time
The question mark remains, even leaving for the “ Journey to Italy “, proposed by Roberto Beragnoli through a series of images created with AI, evoking sensations from stolen shots and random memories. They, too, are artificial memories, but they accompany us on a journey that is perceived as both familiar and surreal at the same time, arousing decidedly controversial feelings.
With his work simultaneously dreamlike and symbolic, yet also highly realistic, this artist returns to the concepts of perception of reality and memory, but he does so on a common ground such as travel, no longer on the artist’s family history. The boundaries between real and imaginary remain blurred, and by hovering there, as on an alpine ridge, one can gaze upon a panorama of double vastness. In the foreground is the concept of formation, historically and literarily connected to the theme of “Journey to Italy,” but which in Beragnoli’s work returns in the use of generative AI with which he himself is confronted, and in the training of this technology that “forms” continuously, engulfing images of the past.
This is not an impromptu experiment or an attempt at provocation: “Journey to Italy” is a studied and intentional work, the result of input gathered from previous experiences. It is enough to mention one to understand its genre, the first one, the one from which it all originated. January 2022, word spreads in Ravenna of the unexpected discovery of a Roman domus completely covered with mosaics that have remained intact. It causes a stir, and when it turns out to be fake news, it outrages some, but it makes everyone think about the images created with generative AI from which it all came. Because the news was tremendously believable precisely because of the “fault” or “merit” of those so produced by Beragnoli. It was he who engineered it all, in fact, on the occasion of one of his exhibitions in the city of mosaics. A “test” that confirmed to him “the power of this technology, capable of producing images that seem familiar even if they are not real,” he explains, “from there I thought of using them for a project I was already thinking about, to show that Italy I had in mind to enhance.
In “Journey to Italy,” he deliberately chose not to specify what he wanted in the images within the prompts, letting, starting with only minimal indications, the camera decide with its randomness. And so he got very realistic photos: “era by era, they just look like they were really taken, both in terms of image quality and style that objects, textures and framing. I looked for and found realism,” he explains. His work then also becomes a reflection on the evolution of the photographic medium: “as the years change, the images evolve, but so do the shots and the subjects, and AI makes it happen faithfully, emphasizing how photography and technologies, styles and media have changed over the years.”
Enthusiasts can also look at Beragnoli’s project in this key, although his main goal remains to “create sincere emotions and a sense of suspension, in time and space. To make people feel a strong sense of familiarity with the people who appear in the photos, as if they were familiar people.” To deceive?
No, to make us think about the emotions themselves and how they trigger within us, even in front of something that has been created through data processing and we know it. “We are perfectly aware that AI created them, just as we know that art, in all its manifestations, has always been fiction, and yet it has always triggered feelings in us that can surprise us and leave us incredulous.” The much-vaunted “generative disruptive AI,” thus politely takes its place alongside other artistic expressions, from Beragnoli’s perspective. For him, as an artist, it represents a revolutionary new creative possibility to be experimented with. “There are so many models and I like to know them, it doesn’t bother me at all that it is a tool accessible to everyone. It certainly won’t turn everyone into an artist, those who are, remain artists regardless, not afraid that democratization will destroy or change the art world.
Speaking of who is really an artist, after the fake news about the mosaic in Ravenna, here comes Beragnoli again to pleasantly-but this time avowedly-deceive us with “The Most Complete Anthology of the Greatest Non-Existent Artist of the Last 100 Years.” A new project in which he has had fun creating artists who do not exist, complete with works and biography. It is an answer to a question he has asked himself and wants to ask: “If human creativity could express itself without having any barriers to realizability, how would it produce?” A few examples are fragmented in Beragnoli’s pages, examples and ideas, to which the answers of each of us can be added, triggering a collective reflection “on the concept of human creativity and on what art should say and tell, from the past to today.” A necessary reflection for humanity, in an age when there is a tendency to offload the responsibilities of the creative process to machines. What about the artist?
3. Self-Reflection and Inquiry
People like Lorenzo Bacci and Flavio Moriniello, are certainly not willing to let others decide what to create, be it people or technologies, generative AI included. Studied and experimented with for years, as artists and in other guises, in “Brave New World Word” they deliberately used it for images of convivial gatherings and offline meetings, in an age of virtual pervasiveness. The shots created are undated, “memorabilia” posters of a rave culture that must fight to preserve its existence. And the intent is not to lend a hand: “ours is a metaphotographic project, we did not want to talk about the subject but about the tool, generative AI and how it democratizes art in a generalized way because it is easy and accessible,” they explain.
They especially wish to dwell on the concept of image: does it have document value? When?
They ask this of the viewer, of society, of those who produce so many, as photographers and journalists, of those who look at thousands a day, mesmerized by the Instagram feed. When faced with any image, we should all ask ourselves what we are seeing: reality?
“Today it is necessary for everyone to understand that you cannot be sure you know what is in front of you. Our work sets off alarm bells and insinuates doubts, invites people to ask questions and not to take the bait,” they continue, “we need a strong critical spirit in the face of information, an inner compass, not to blindly trust everything and to think for ourselves.
The choice of Polaroid, in this sense, “voluntarily raises the bar,” because this very photographic medium impulsively prompts one to think of photos that were actually taken. “They are the most unsuspected, they also have a symbolic value, of authenticity of the shot and the image, they represent for many the instant, real, genuine image, they evoke vernacular photography,” they specify.
Between art, music, and photography, a reflection on creativity also remains present in Brave New World. What is it?
According to Bacci and Moriniello, it is not about having a sudden idea, like a lightning bolt, but a process of knowledge and effort. They show this through an analogy between the electronic music represented in polaroids and the generative AI used to produce them. Both are based on continuous copying and mixing: according to them, the creative process works just that way, and always has. Generative AI only accentuates an ongoing democratization of the image manipulation process. It makes it accessible to anyone, and although the real art remains in how you use it, the awareness of what you are looking at should democratize at the same pace.
GENERATE FUTURES
1. Mixing tradition and innovation
Walking the timeline in the opposite direction, one loses almost all trace of the “fake” risk: impossible to photograph the future, one can only pretend to do so, either with imagination or, in the case of generative AI, by remixing images from the past.
While crossing and crossing the threshold of the present, then, creation turns its back on the future, while claiming to offer scenarios of what has not yet been. A stunt that artists can perform with audacity and many different intentions, more or less candid and provocative.
Finding the “perfect mix of real lives, history and art,” using three unique generative AI models (You, Tarikh and Honar), Iranian artist Farbod Mehr brought a young woman to life. He named her Nava, which means “melody” in Persian, “to symbolize her harmonious essence,” he explains. On his Instagram profile he is having fun making her travel through time, imagining her in futuristic scenarios where tradition and technology meet.
“It’s a fun way to engage people and push them to explore deeper questions about identity and heritage in an age of very rapid change,” he explains. “Nava makes art a bridge, and a meeting point between tradition and innovation, allowing the past to affect the way we imagine the future.
As an artist, Mojallal-mehr has chosen to use the “powers” of generative AI to connect the traditional heritage of his own culture with the present, but not only that. He jumps on the trampoline and launches himself into the future, taking us all with him, and asking us to imagine new possibilities for his country in the coming decades. “I offer new life to cultural narratives that are in danger of being lost, conveying a sense of resilience and cultural continuity. I want to reach both those who feel a strong connection to Iranian culture and those who may not know it, inviting everyone to see a shared humanity in the details and reimagine cultural heritage. Together with me and Nava, one can dare to challenge conventional perspectives on tradition.”
In his work we see in real time taking shape a more inclusive collective vision of the future, one that values history but is not afraid to reshape it. “It is both liberating and challenging, AI offers endless possibilities and is allowing me to connect past and future in ways I could never have done without it. It’s really exciting to see these two worlds collide and create something new,” he admits, vibrating with the excitement that animates him internally as well, the same excitement that drove him to experiment with this technology, even though he is aware of the risks and limitations it carries.
In fact, he developed some “personal tricks,” such as refining the three models with data from three completely different sources. “For the first, I invited Instagram users to contribute, adding an element of randomness and community input; for another, I drew on historical photographs of Iranian women; and for the third, I drew on paintings. By combining these perspectives, I circumvented some of the inherent biases of AI, producing portraits that felt authentic and culturally resonant,” he says. He seems satisfied with his experiments and goes on, gathering “incredibly gratifying” reactions, both from members of the Iranian community (within Iran and in the diaspora) and from non-Iranian people. The former see themselves reflected in ways they had never seen before, the latter are curious to investigate how generative AI can play a role in shaping cultural narratives. He wants to continue to reach out to both targets, because all are needed if one is to revise one’s country’s identity in the modern world.
Among those looking at the images that as they appear on Mojallal-mehr’s Instagram wall form a mosaic of possible futures, a distinction of cultural origin but also of generation must be made. “Her work references intergenerational trauma (e.g., Qajar Portraits Revisited: The Rise of Iranian Women) and certain taboos that as age changes can be addressed differently,” explains Raika Khorshidian. As an Iranian, Khorshidian relates that the Iranian Z and Alpha generations “are much more open, they don’t believe in regime propaganda and power distance in traditional families, because they grew up with the Internet and social media, even though it is mostly filtered in Iran.” Staying in this age group, reactions to Farbod’s works therefore vary little among Iranians in Iran or in the diaspora, “there remains the strength of her freedom of speech, of expression, of lifestyle choice, which does not and will not exist under the current Islamic regime.”
Everything changes when faced with the reactions of those with more years of memories in their eyes and hearts. When the artist reimagines Iran’s 1979 Revolution as a music festival, according to Khorshidian, in Iranians born between the 1950s and 1960s, “it almost arouses nostalgia or regret, because their quality of life was significantly improved and they had the freedom to choose their future and that of the next generation in a peaceful state. This work questions them about what would have happened if they had channeled their energy into self-expression, music and dance, instead of being armed and blindly seeking the solution to their society in religious fanaticism and communism.”
Thanks to Khorshidian, one can grasp the potential of Mojallal-mehr’s art on the Iranian public and observe with his eyes that on those who are not. Generative AI artists like him have begun to change the global image of Iranian identity, wisely identifying the need for a new and challenging kind of Persian futurism that requires imagination beyond our existing paradigms,”‘he explains. And as an Iranian and expert, she hopes that this generation will truly understand the power of image and imagination to challenge reality and move toward a better future.
2. Thinking about the Planet
In the better future envisioned and re-created with generative AI by Ilaria Merola, at the center are respect for the environment and women’s rights, both key issues for those who, like her, have always frequented “a very masculine and macho environment.” She still hangs out there doing work as a UX designer but, thanks to this technology, as an artist she has forged the concept of “neural metamorphosis.” “Neural,” because of neural networks, “metamorphosis” to represent a female aesthetic strongly connected to nature. “The message is that women will be the ones who can and already do lead the transformation of the world to more natural principles,” she says, “just pay attention to it, and that is what is already trying to happen in many parts of the world.
He chose a futuristic, pop, at times fashionable style, the one he loves in his everyday life as well, and he leveraged the maximum freedom of creation that generative AI grants to let nature and humankind mingle. This can be seen very well in a trailer created around the concept of “butterfly” in which a tribe of butterfly women help the Planet regain its balance after humankind has condemned itself to extinction.
“Again I retain the environmental message that is fundamental to me and that I want to address to everyone, specifically. In fact, I chose not to look at one specific target audience, instead forcefully flaunting the beauty of nature to emphasize and remind how we are losing it every day,” he clarifies, “I want it to be evident to everyone, not just those who are already aware of it,” he explains.
Generative AI has multiplied the opportunities to do so in ways previously unimaginable. Always looking toward the future, through even science fiction books and movies, Merola immediately saw in this technology the tool to create what he had never been able to shape for reasons of both cost and time and expertise. “I started with a short science fiction video to express my vision of the future, combining climate crisis and gender rights. I immediately felt a sense of being free to express my message and values using language, images and emotions that I had always had in mind but could never before access,” she recounts. In her words, one breathes the joy of someone who has won freedom of expression and imagination, the chance to share what was caged in the mind, pulsing and strong. A message to the world and society that Merola artist wants to send more and more effectively. He is now doing this mostly with AI-generated videos, “because they have a narrative power that I think is unique,” he explains, showing two recent creations: the teaser of “Genesis Reborn” (Teaser 2023): and “Plastic Gods” (Short Film 2024). She also experiments with and dreams of integrating video mapping and sound-related technologies; they fascinate and intrigue her and could still offer her new powers of expression of possible futures.
3. All kinds of role model
If in the datasets of images in which they “fish” for the models used by Merola there are “quite a few women,” it is because of those produced by Helen Pink. With her MissJourney, she has put several of them on the web, but not at random: with the complicity of generative AI, she has created those of women in professions considered “not really for women,” at least looking at stock images and common mindsets. Astronauts and engineers, lawyers and managers, startuppers and surgeons, and so on.
Born out of TedXAmsterdam Women, this project dates back to before the boom related to the launch of ChatGPT. “I wanted to immediately highlight the presence of bias in the Internet, bias that already exists and that AI only returns,” Pink explains, “It’s a pilot project that started from observing how, by asking for ‘smart’ or wealthy professions, we only ever got images of white men. So we created a tool that would make only of women, with all the different jobs that women can do as much as men. And these are not beautiful, always perfect, white, skinny women, but women of all shapes and backgrounds, ages and types.”
The intent of such a focused project is clear from the outset: “to show that it all depends on how the algorithm was developed, because it should not allow the perpetuation of bias. You always have to delve into how the AI was developed and what its limitation is, so that you can then use it to its best advantage,” Pink explains.
If you look it up online, now MissJourney no longer “spins,” no longer creates women, no longer imagines, but we can continue to do so. She generated months of it, was a provocation and had time to trigger reactions and reflections that are still necessary and alive today. “Too few people are asking questions and paying attention to AI bias and the problem needed to be highlighted. These are stereotypes that we often have unconsciously embedded and don’t even realize we have them,” Pink says, “It’s ‘normal’ today not to be surprised in the least when faced with an all-male panel, but if you find it of all women, you notice it right away. Yeah, it happens that way, for now, but we don’t have to accept it in silence, and Pink’s work, invites everyone not to. Women and men.
“There are fathers who have written to me thanking me, for offering them a tool to show their daughters images of women doing various jobs, even the ones they dreamed of doing and risked feeling strange about wanting,” Pink says, smiling with satisfaction at seeing “her” Miss Journey become a factory of female role models that society lacks in image frequency. An important factory not only for women of the present and future, but for society as a whole. Being able to range in different, truly diverse images is an invitation and an opportunity for everyone to “humanize society and put at the center the value of people as people, for their authenticity and what they are really worth, not based on the category they belong to. There is a deep need for this, according to Pink, in a society like ours that is “very polarized, even politically, even in Europe. Women are left behind, equality policies are absent, we continually lose equity and diversity in our societies, and implementing inclusive strategies is difficult. Segregated in so many silos, we have totally lost the ability to look at the reality we live in and realize what it looks like. If we embraced it, paying attention to the people around us, we would realize that we are immersed in diversity.” It is necessary at this point to jump the fence, and Pink does so with us, to get into the merits of who develops the technologies that create or fuel bias. Teams that, like most stock image archives, almost always consist of male, white, rich, young people. “It is from here, however, that it is critical that there is diversity of gender and ethnicity, because if diversity is lacking in the group of people who develop the technologies, by necessity we then find biases within them,” Pink says, “confronting those who develop technology often, I realized that there is a total lack of awareness of the impact their choices have on society. They don’t feel or take that responsibility, they are only interested in whether what they have developed works and makes the company successful. This I think is the real source of the many problems that we then see reflected in society.” Diversity in tech teams, then, and meanwhile awareness in everyone, of how the AI tools we use work that we inevitably live with and will continue to live with, and how we can and should use them. “We should not panic but try to understand the positive that they can create.”
WHAT ARE WE GENERATING?
With her avowedly unbalanced nature toward activism and outreach rather than on artistic aspects, MissJourney proposes and imposes a kind of stretching to our thinking. What is needed before we can devote ourselves to those of those who have met these artists along with me, but with a different wealth of experience and knowledge in their eyes and chests.
Francesco D’Isa
Philosopher and AI artist, Francesco D’Isa, begins with an important “if.” “If not neutered by multinational corporations, generative AIs can offer much opportunity and potential even to those with fewer skills,” he explains, certain that the democratization it entails “will not bring down the quality of real art or impact the creative engagement and value of artists. On the contrary, they are often the first to access the possibility of creating in an even different way, opening themselves up to new possibilities for expressing concepts they have inside.”
Thus extinguishing any possible flame of industry controversy, D’Isa travels with me back and forth in time, and in works. We start from the past, where generative AI “can help investigate stereotypes that belong to us or belong to a certain society, bringing them to the surface. But it can also happen to reiterate them without us noticing: few people today do that, and that is the problem, not AI itself.” According to the D’Isa-artist and also the D’Isa-philosopher/teacher, “the role of real artists is to notice and go beyond that, to experiment with different and thought-out uses, without being satisfied with the first outputs you get. Only by showing the biases that exist and are not easily noticed can they destroy them, helping us to change the personal and collective view of the past.” With him, one imagines an artist who is “powerful,” but who nonetheless finds himself operating within a double cage, that of the culture in which he is immersed, and that of the databases with which the tool he uses to create has been trained. As evident in Mavropoulou’s experience, they are composed of American, or Chinese, images, and an artist from other areas is forced to create from images that are already culturally “pre-conditioned.” Among colleagues, homogeneous starting conditions are not shared. This gap persists even when turning heels 180 degrees, using AI to generate images of what has not yet happened. “Thus turned around, it becomes a completely unique telescope, fishing and recombining images from the past to show future. So there is a strong risk that it will repurpose old biases and even ‘old’ creativity,” D’Isa explains. “The true artist always remains the one whose task it is to break the mold and create different, unprecedented visions. To do this he must inevitably have full awareness of how generative AI works and the ability to recognize past biases and patterns. Few today really have that.” The risk of finding oneself looking at, or even producing, a “new” that smacks of the past rehashed is high, but it cannot be helped, or perhaps even worth taking.
Eugenio Marongiu
He no longer asks himself this question, Eugenio Marongiu, because he has been using this technology for years now to seek new solutions and new ways of expressing himself. One only has to browse through his Instagram profile katsukokoisu.ai to realize this and notice in what key he has chosen to seize the opportunities of the resulting images. “I use them to create a future in which I can insert new concepts and values, imagine and visualize different scenarios of climate disaster, or economic or social disaster, and denied and ignored rights,” he recounts. He does this with his full smile, bright eyes, and bushy, proud mustache, because the intent is constructive: he wants to “show how the world is becoming and awaken outrage.”
For me, art has always been denunciation, AI just offered me a new technical opportunity.”
His verve in criticizing aesthetic representation and beauty ideals goes back before and is what always pushes him to go beyond first results and clichés, to propose “a new ideal of beauty for the future, where flaws and old age are not real flaws but, along with imperfection and diversity, are values,” he tells. One example out of all, her “tattooed elderly twins,” which from April 2023 to date have garnered over a million likes and nearly 12 thousand comments. Some even very negative, “but not about the use of generative AI, but about the image itself. Many were outraged because I wanted to represent old age in a different way, not through their soothing clichés.”
Giorgia Aiello
Looking around, letting her gaze linger thoughtfully on the images of each artist and entering the mechanisms of MissJourney with the precision of a watchmaker from another era, Giorgia Aiello crossly perceives “the desire to appropriate new media to make creative and imaginative use of them, without any journalistic purpose, but rather evocative-imaginative.”
He evokes the work of Mavropoulou and that of Farbod Mojallal-mehr, similar but not quite. “In the latter there is work on tradition, including through layers of AI mediation used to recover it,” he points out, “but both make us think about the role of imagination in our culture and to its meaning in itself.
He quotes Lev Manovich, recalls the stochastic process that artificial intelligence relies on “to generate and transform entropy into information based on prediction. It does not imagine anything new, it recombines by referring back to the mediasets with which you train it, it creates, but with restrictions that you have to take into account. Biases already exist in mediasets.”
Artists, also according to Aiello, have a role to go beyond engineering capabilities and find ways to use Generative AI to overcome these limitations as well, but not only that. “They can also help Industry AI develop in the right direction by improving the tools it develops.”
And while pushing the boundaries of artistic ambitions further and further, Aiello reminds how this positive step forward should not amplify the confusion that already exists between engineering bias and human and cultural bias. The former can be combated by having better gen-AI tools developed; the latter have been depopulating our society forever, and l, to eliminate them, it takes more than an AI tool, even a well-designed one, as MissJourney’s creator Pink would like.
According to Aiello, this very project is an example of how artists can denounce and highlight the “gendered” engineering problem, but it should not lead us to believe that we can thus also act on the cultural biases underlying it. Those were, are, and remain ingrained in the society that must evolve from a human perspective to get rid of them.
“We must not fall captive to an ‘AI loop’; artists cannot fight cultural bias by creating images with a medium that has engineering biases, because they will be new but born in an already constrained context that will in turn go to nurture,” he explains, calling GenAI’s “an extractive process, and not just because of an artistic copyright issue but also because of exploited workers, environmental impacts and energy costs.” Three chapters that, more than chapters, are new volumes to be created, keeping human gaze and human desire to dig deep. Soon but patiently and tenaciously.
THE EXPERTS
Francesco D’Isa
A trained philosopher and digital artist, Francesco D’Isa has exhibited internationally in galleries and contemporary art centers. His best-known works include the novel “Therese’s Room” (Tunué, 2017) and the philosophical essay “The Absurd Evidence” (Edizioni Tlon, 2022). In 2023 he published the graphic novel “Sunyata” with Eris Edizioni, the first comic book published in Italy created with artificial intelligence, and in 2024 the essay “The Algorithmic Revolution of Images” for Sossella Editore (2024). Editorial director of the cultural magazine L’Indiscreto, he writes and draws for various magazines, both Italian and foreign. He teaches Philosophy and Digital Art at private Italian and international universities. Instagram profile
Eugenio Marongiu
Known as Katsukoko.ai, he is artificial intelligence artist recognized for his innovative approach to artificial intelligence-generated imagery and video. In capacity as an alpha tester for OpenAI’s Sora and as a creative partner of platforms such as Runway and Luma, Eugenio blends artistic vision with advanced technology to create thought-provoking narratives. With a background as a professional photographer and over 340,000 followers on Instagram, he explores themes ranging from human emotions to futuristic aesthetics, positioning himself as a leading voice in the AI art revolution. Instagram profile
Giorgia Aiello
Full professor in sociology of cultural and communicative processes at the University of Milan and a visiting professor at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. She received her doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle, and lived and worked in the United States and Britain for 20 years before returning to Italy in 2021. She has been invited to lecture in 14 countries and served as a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Engagement in New York, the University of Antwerp, and the University of Paris-Nanterre. He works on the problems and potentials of visual communication in digital media and everyday life, particularly with regard to the relationship between global capitalism, identities, and social and cultural differences. Her publications include numerous articles and essays on photography, data visualization, media images, political imagery, visual branding, and urban spaces. She is the author of Communication, Espace, Image (2022, Les Presses du Réel) and coauthor of Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (with Katy Parry; 2020, SAGE). LinkedIn profile
Raika Khorshidian
Georg Forster Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bonn, she is an art scholar, lecturer and independent curator. In 2023 she co-organized with Prof. Birgit Mersmann the international workshop “Collective Trauma and Future Imaginations: The Power of (Visual) Art for Social and Political Transition in Iran.” The main themes of the workshop and of the forthcoming open access editorial book (2026) were art activism and art-based disobedience in the Women, Life, Freedom movement; the role of social media as a medium for art-political activism; art-historical studies on social change and political transition, particularly in relation to future fantasies. LinkedIn profile
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This report is the result of a team effort that gave me much more than a link with my name on it.
- the current and continuing alliance with Neelabh Kumar, a student at Central Saint Martins (University of the Art London), met through Cecilia Mezzi, lecturer at the MA Applied Imagination at the same institution, a skilled and original researcher with a focus on storytelling and data, and Emanuele Del Rosso, communications coordinator of Display Europe and deputy director of the European Cartoon Award.
- Intense and endless contamination with Raika Khorshidian who has been helping me look at and narrate about a “unbiased” Iran since I met her through International Journalists’ Programmes and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
It was September 2024, it was a workshop on AI and climate migration, and no generative AI model would have thought of creating this
