Art has always existed in a complex, symbiotic and continually evolving relationship with the technological capabilities of a culture. Those capabilities constrain the art that is produced, and inform the way art is perceived and understood by its audience.

Like the invention of applied pigments, the printing press, photography, and computers, we believe machine intelligence is an innovation that will profoundly affect art. As with these earlier innovations, it will ultimately transform society in ways that are hard to imagine from today’s vantage point; in the nearer term, it will expand our understanding of both external reality and our perceptual and cognitive processes.

As with earlier technologies, some artists will embrace machine intelligence as a new medium or a partner, while others will continue using today’s media and modes of production. In the future, even the act of rejecting it may be a conscious statement, just as photorealistic painting is a statement today. Any artistic gesture toward machine intelligence — whether negative, positive, both, or neither — seems likelier to withstand the test of time if it’s historically grounded and technically well informed.

Walter Benjamin illustrated this point mordantly in his 1931 essay, Little History of Photography, citing an 1839 critique of the newly announced French daguerreotype technology in the Leipziger Stadtanzeiger (a “chauvinist rag”):

“To try to capture fleeting mirror images,” it said, “is not just an impossible undertaking, as has been established after thorough German investigation; the very wish to do such a thing is blasphemous. Man is made in the image of God, and God’s image cannot be captured by any machine of human devising. The utmost the artist may venture, borne on the wings of divine inspiration, is to reproduce man’s God-given features without the help of any machine, in the moment of highest dedication, at the higher bidding of his genius.”

This sense of affront over the impingement of technology on what had been considered a defining human faculty has obvious parallels with much of today’s commentary on machine intelligence. It’s a reminder that what Rosi Braidotti has called “moral panic about the disruption of centuries-old beliefs about human ‘nature’” is nothing new11. [1]