(Credits: Far Out / Ademar do Nascimento)
While AI art has resurfaced as a recent topic of debate caused by its perversion through social media, a robot possessing numerical creativity is not recent. Since the autonomous picture creator AARON was created by Professor Harold Cohen in 1973, artists have collaborated and experimented with artificial intelligence. Similar questions, concerns and qualms have also been raised, such as, is it art, or is it even creative?
The questions are morally unresolvable and subjective. As AI advances, it grows in its controversy as it progresses to be virtually limitless. The friction between the algorithm and artists has been an uphill battle. However, the reconciliation between both sides has started to grow. This follows the new productive programmes such as DALL·E 2, DreamStudio and Midjourney, which have an undeniably fertile database and produce magazine-worthy images, marking an end to the colour-blocking, abstract AI art era from the 1970s.
AI’s realistic rendering has led many AI artists to visualise a utopia for themselves. Afrofuturism has thrived in this art form. Notably architectural designer Ademar do Nascimento. His AI art spans from fashion and architecture to interior design, effectively creating an entire universe inspired by African heritage. Do Nascimento “is interested in investigating the intersectionality between traditional and contemporary Black aesthetics and spaces in which they manifest in the contemporary digital age. His concepts are born out of a curiosity to interrogate and challenge existing ideas of African/Black spaces and their representations, which are often misunderstood or mischaracterised”. His concept called ‘Ethnic Library’ explores Angolan aesthetics based on the design through a futuristic lens, demonstrating AI’s potency.
However, Do Nascimento’s imagination carries these Afrofuturistic works – without his proficiency in design and architectural ideas, AI’s visuals would be futile. His work can be found on his Instagram, where his latest exploration of fashion inspired by the Maasai tribe garnered more than 30,000 views.
Alternate Afrofuturistic realities were also portrayed in the ‘Imagine Blackness’ exhibition at the Creative Pinellas Gallery, Florida, in January 2023. The exhibition reimagined and inspired Afrofuturism in an “otherworldly futuristic sci-fi cosmos”. The artists McArthur Freeman and Dr Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman used AI to form an artistic, social intervention. Dr Hordge-Freeman is a sociologist specialising in systems of oppression; AI has enabled her to utilise art to convey this project on identity and diaspora without any formal artistic training.
However, despite AI being used to reimagine the lives of marginalised communities and make social progress, it still has algorithmic biases. Joy Buollamwini’s ‘The Coded Gaze’ explores this further: “AI systems are shaped by the priorities and prejudices — conscious and unconscious — of the people who design them, a phenomenon that I refer to as ‘the coded gaze’. Research has shown that automated systems that are used to inform decisions about sentencing produce results that are biased against black people and that those used for selecting the targets of online advertising can discriminate based on race and gender”. Buolamwini has founded the Algorithmic Justice League to combat AI’s prejudices – her work also includes her Gender Shades Thesis, uncovering the frightening intersectional bias within AI. The prejudices in AI are particularly frightening as it is being used for national and cyber security, infiltrating even more discrimination into governing bodies.
Organisations like AI for Social Progress also fight to include diverse training datasets. “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves,” it states, shedding light on the “asymmetrical battle between profits and ethics”.
Despite the age-old debate surrounding ‘authentic creativity’ within AI art, its collaboration with the Afrofuturism movement is slowly upheaving and shedding light on its discriminatory tendencies and providing an experimental medium for activists to spread their message.
