So, the latest dispatch from the land of blinking lights and investor dreams lands on my desk, or rather, the sticky patch on the bar where my desk used to be before I sold it for whiskey money. AI art residencies. Sounds like a goddamn finishing school for robots, teaching them how to hold a paintbrush with their cold, metallic claws. The idea is to ‘change the conversation,’ they say. The conversation usually goes something like, ‘Is this thing going to steal my job, my soul, or just my goddamn credit card number?’ and they want to change it to, ‘Oh, isn’t that a lovely shade of blue the algorithm picked?’ Christ. I need a smoke just thinking about it.
They trotted out an AI jaguar in Copenhagen. Huk, they call it. Sounds like something you do after too much cheap gin. This digital beast ‘watches the crowd, selected individuals, and began to share stories.’ Stories about its daughter, its rainforest, the fires. Touching. Real touching. Especially when you remember it’s a bunch of code spun up by some lab coats. The artist, Violeta Ayala, says her goal was to ‘build a robot that could represent something more than human; something incorruptible.’ More than human? Lady, have you met humans? We’re a mess of glorious contradictions, lusts, and bad decisions. That’s the whole damn point. ‘Incorruptible’ sounds like something dreamed up by a monk who’s never had a good stiff drink or a bad, bad woman. Or maybe just a PR department. Probably the PR department. An incorruptible jaguar. What’s next? A chaste politician? A sober poet? The world’s full of enough illusions without the machines adding to the pile. I’ll take my jaguars wild and unpredictable, thank you very much, not something programmed to whisper sweet nothings about its digital cub.
And here’s where the grift gets a nice, glossy coat of paint. These ‘residencies’ – fancy summer camps for code and canvas – are popping up everywhere, funded by the same outfits that are trying to sell us AI for everything from flipping our burgers to writing our eulogies. They call it ‘soft power.’ That’s a polite way of saying they’re trying to grease the skids, make us all warm and fuzzy about the digital overlords before they fully take over the asylum. You get a piece of ‘AI art’ in the Museum of Modern Art, and suddenly the whole enterprise looks less like a hostile takeover of human creativity and more like a cultured philanthropic endeavor. It’s like putting a tuxedo on a pickpocket. He’s still after your wallet, he just looks more respectable doing it. This Villa Albertine, another one of these outfits, even got backing from Fidji Simo, who’s apparently the CEO of applications at OpenAI. Yeah, those guys. The ones who want their chatbots to be our best friends, our therapists, and probably our landlords if they could swing it. Sure, let them sponsor the art. What could go wrong? It’s like letting the fox design the security system for the henhouse. Only this fox has a few billion in venture capital and an army of marketing flacks whispering sweet nothings about ‘democratizing creativity.’ My ass.
Then you got this Mohamed Bouabdallah, Villa Albertine’s director, talking about how they ‘select the artist, not just their work.’ And how ’the tool must be behind the human.’ Noble sentiments. Sounds like something you’d hear at a goddamn self-help seminar right before they try to sell you a crystal that’ll align your chakras and your bank account. ‘Articulate their intent,’ he says. Intent. My intent right now is to find the bottom of this bourbon bottle and maybe scrawl a few lines about the absurdity of a world that thinks a machine can have ‘intent’ in the first place. Does that count as artistic intent? Or do I need a research grant and a roomful of whirring servers cooled by the tears of unemployed graphic designers? It’s all about ‘authorship,’ they claim. As if slapping your name on something a machine shat out after gobbling up a million other real artists’ work makes you Rembrandt. It’s the oldest trick in the book: dress up the mundane in fancy language and sell it as profound. Like calling a greasy spoon diner a ‘culinary narrative experience.’ It’s still a place to get a questionable burger and a cup of lukewarm coffee, no matter how many syllables you throw at it. This whole ‘AI art’ scene is starting to feel like one long, elaborately funded distraction. Another shot, bartender.
Thank Christ for the ethicists, even if they probably don’t drink enough to see the world as clearly as some of us barflies. This Trystan Goetze fellow from Cornell hits the nail on the head, or at least taps it gently with a well-reasoned mallet. He says, ‘Changing the context from random users prompting models in Discord to formal residencies doesn’t alter the core issues. The labor is still being taken.’ Bingo. There it is, plain as the nose on your face, or the debt on your credit card. You can put lipstick on a pig, call it Sophie, give it a beret and an easel, and enter it into the damn Salon des Refusés, but it’s still a goddamn pig. And these AI models are feasting on the artistic equivalent of the world’s biggest, free-for-all buffet, cooked by generations of actual, sweating, bleeding, starving human artists. The ‘residencies’ are just a way to make the pig look a little more presentable at the dinner table before it eats your job. ‘Packaging the use of AI in a form that resembles traditional artistic practice,’ Goetze calls it. That’s rich. Like a counterfeiter setting up a ‘currency appreciation society’ to discuss the finer points of his craft while passing off dud twenties. It’s all smoke and mirrors, a way to make the unacceptable seem… well, acceptable. Or at least confusing enough that most people just shrug, order another beer, and hope the robots don’t replace the guy pouring it too soon.
They drag out the old piano roll argument. Back in 1908, the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, said piano rolls weren’t copyrightable because a human couldn’t read ‘em with the naked eye. Then everyone with a song in their heart and a bill from their publisher screamed bloody murder, and Congress had to step in and change the law. The implication being, see? New tech always scares the horses, but we eventually figure out how to put a saddle on it. Cute. Real cute. Except a piano roll was a direct, mechanical reproduction of a performance. This AI slop is something else entirely. It’s like a player piano that listened to every song ever written, from Bach to a drunken sailor’s shanty, then bashed out something vaguely new-ish that sounds a bit like all of them and a bit like nothing at all, all while claiming it invented the goddamn keyboard. And the real kicker, as Goetze points out, is normalization. ‘The more we’re exposed to these visuals, the more ’normal’ they might seem.’ That’s how they get you. First, it’s a quirky AI jaguar in a Danish museum. Next, it’s AI news anchors delivering headlines with perfect, soulless diction, AI judges handing down sentences based on algorithmic prejudice, AI therapists nodding sympathetically while data-mining your deepest fears. We’ll all be so used to the synthetic sheen on everything that actual, messy, human-made stuff will look… quaint. Or even amateurish. Like a handwritten love letter in an age of emojis. A charming relic, perhaps, but ultimately as useless as a screen door on a submarine.
This Ayala dame, the one with the digital jaguar, she does say one thing that rings truer than a bar fight on a Saturday night: ’the problem is not that AI copies – humans copy constantly – it’s that the benefits are not distributed equally: the big companies benefit most.’ No shit, Sherlock. That’s the story of the goddamn world, ain’t it? The house always wins, and the house, in this case, is a handful of corporations with more money than God and the morals of an alley cat haggling over a fishbone. She thinks these residencies are ‘important sites of experimentation,’ a way to ‘actively build alternatives.’ Maybe. Or maybe it’s just another way for artists to get a few crumbs from the tech giants’ overflowing table, a little funding to play with the new, shiny toys while the main game – the one about control, data, and unimaginable profit – carries on upstairs in the penthouse suite, far from the prying eyes of us schmucks on the ground. ‘We’re transitioning as a species,’ she says. Yeah, we’re transitioning, alright. Transitioning into what, though? A species that outsources its soul to the highest bidding algorithm? That trades a messy, beautiful, flawed, human-made world for a clean, efficient, and utterly sterile digital replica? I’ll take the mess, thanks. The spilled drinks, the broken hearts, the off-key singing in a crowded bar. That’s where the real art is, not in some ‘incorruptible’ jaguar cooked up in a lab, no matter how many stories it tells.
So, these AI art residencies. Are they changing the conversation? Maybe. But they’re not changing the fundamental con. It’s still about power, money, and who gets to define what’s real, what’s valuable, what’s human. They can dress it up in gallery lighting and academic jargon all they want, but it smells the same to me. Like old dreams and new money, a cocktail that always leaves a bitter, cloying aftertaste. Me, I’m sticking with the old ways. A battered typewriter, a half-full (or half-empty, depending on the hour) bottle, and a healthy, deeply ingrained distrust of anyone trying to sell me a better future, especially if it’s run by a goddamn machine. At least my hangovers are authentically mine, earned fair and square.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, this bourbon ain’t going to drink itself, and there’s a blank page staring back at me with the cold, dead eyes of a loan shark. Someone’s gotta fill it with some honest bullshit.
Chinaski out. Probably for another drink.
Source: AI residencies are trying to change the conversation around artificial art