M.A. Hanna Sipos

Dissertation Project:

Is this A(I)rt forgery? The value assessment of AI assisted generative art by Art Museums and Galleries in Europe considering agency and their potential as canons.

Since the beginning of the 2020’s, advancements in Artificial Intelligence and deep machine learning have brought forth the widespread use of text-to-image generative AI models, such as Dream Studio by Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and Open AI’s DALLE-3, making the creation of digital imagery more accessible for a wider public. The implications of this new technology effect ethical, legal, technical, and theoretical discussions, and have the potential to reshape our understanding of “value of art”, “authorship” and “art forgery”.

This research aims to investigate the perspective of contemporary art museums on the topic of AI art, their process of evaluating emerging branches of art, and determining which works are worth preserving in their collection for the future. As museums play an impactful part in the preservation of artistic and cultural artefacts, their view on AI generated art will influence the role these works will take – or not take - on in the future.

Core questions of research are: “What qualifies a work as art?”, “What makes art valuable and worth preserving?”, “What is the relationship between artist and program in the creative process and how does this relationship influence the value of the outcome?”, “How is the aspect of forgery discussed in generated images in terms of authorship and skills?”, and “What parameters can be set within AI art to help determine artistic works from mass-media imagery?”.

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Alain Müller