What AI Will Do to Art - The Atlantic

Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:0035:06

The art was way too heavy.<br>In mid-March, the artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst were preparing an installation to coincide with the Venice Biennale, the prestigious international art festival, but the execution was becoming tricky. They wanted to suspend sculptures of a trippy cityscape upside down from the ceiling of an 18th-century palazzo. But the construction material they envisioned—​3-D-printed sand—would weigh tons, which was more than the antique building could bear. The sculptures, they realized, might fall and crush someone.<br>Explore the August 2026 Issue<br>Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

View More

This was a rather analog problem for a married couple widely seen as technological prophets. Herndon, 46, and Dryhurst, 41, have reached the upper echelons of the art world thanks to a media-spanning output—music, images, software, and reams of commentary—with a cybernetic bent. They are high culture’s most influential exponents of artificial intelligence, an invention that many people believe spells doom for the arts but that they think could lead to a renaissance.<br>I met them on a cold, bright Tuesday in Berlin. Their studio resembled a co-working space, with one long table standing in a sparse room. Herndon sat dwarfed by an AI-generated portrait of herself, in which her red hair and light-blue eyes appeared to drift across her face like leaves in a pond. Dryhurst—bald, with round glasses—fiddled with a vape. They greeted me cheerfully but warned that they were scrambling to rethink their plans for the show, just seven weeks away. Working in Venice, Herndon said with a trace of twang from her native Tennessee, “is way harder to do, because everything’s on boats.”<br>Mattia Balsamini for The Atlantic<br>Herndon and Dryhurst with their son in their Berlin studio

As we walked around their shabbily idyllic neighborhood—day cares kissed by graffiti, gleaming malls near World War II ruins—they described their backup idea: not an upside-down city but an “upside-down parliament,” comprising rows of benches on the ground mirrored by rows of benches hanging from the ceiling. The space would be filled with the “voices” of four AI agents, talking with one another in a made-up, musical language akin to birdsong. As I struggled to picture how this would look and feel, Dryhurst spun a complex web of ideas about high-tech democracy and global knowledge-sharing. The artwork, he said, would suggest how AI might change public life and ask the question “How could you imagine living with the presence of these things?”<br>Read: We’re witnessing the birth of a new artistic medium<br>For a while, I’d been turning over that same question with dread. AI poses challenges to the economy and the environment, but what keeps me up at night is its hideous aesthetic implications. The chirpy prose of ChatGPT; the exaggerated handsomeness of Grok-drawn characters; the cloying songs conjured by Suno—all of it can seem like a pitiless satire of human desire. Art forms that once expressed creators’ personal visions are reduced to fulfilling the audience’s cravings. In theory, I understand why some people say AI is just another creative tool, like the camera or the keyboard. In practice, that tool is filling our world with the ugly, frictionless, disposable content we’ve quickly come to call “slop.”<br>I’m not alone in my revulsion. Although AI has achieved mass adoption—ChatGPT has nearly 1 billion weekly active users worldwide—and the entertainment industry has begun to integrate its efficiencies, large parts of the cultural establishment have taken a hard-line stance against it. Prominent painters, musicians, graphic designers, writers, and filmmakers, along with their associated trade organizations, have strongly objected to the way AI models are trained on human-made work without permission. The critic Hilton Als has written that it’s difficult to think of people who “condone the use of AI sources in the creation of ‘art’ as artists themselves.” The musician Jack Antonoff suggested another term: “godless whores.”<br>Herndon and Dryhurst have nevertheless risen to prominence by using AI to make art about AI. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, the definitive survey of the state of American art, they were the only artists out of 71 participants who used machine learning, training a model to create images of fantastical creatures and characters outfitted with Herndon’s trademark ginger braids. The next year, a print from that show sold for nearly $100,000 at Christie’s first auction devoted entirely to AI art—which drew condemnation in an open letter with thousands of signatures. When the music platform Bandcamp announced a ban on AI songs in January, Herndon was the only prominent artist to object publicly. Online backlash labeled her a “shill” and a “tech bro.”<br>Shills are trying to sell something, and tech bros cheer progress at all costs, but Dryhurst and...