Bruno Fortea Miras |
Brussels (EFE) Now, an exhibition tries to make up for this loss with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) from systems like ChatGPT, while questioning the limits of art.
The exhibition ‘The lost notebooks of Victor Horta’, open until May 30 in Brussels, presents fictional images of hypothetical buildings that Horta could have devised, although, in reality, all the exhibited designs have been recreated by an AI that has learned the basic characteristics of his modernist style.
Sometimes, the photographs seem so reliable that the president of the Atabey entity that organizes the exhibition, Yuni Fajardo, affirms in statements to EFE that, among the most clueless public, there are people who believe that what they see are buildings that really exist in Brussels, and ask where they are, wanting to visit them.
“The goal is for the public, who hears so much about AI, to have something tangible, something that they can see done with AI and that goes beyond a newspaper article,” says Fajardo, alluding to the ethical and political debate that in recent days it has generated the ChatGPT program due to doubts about its transparency.
Use ChatGPT
Precisely, to recreate Horta’s fictional works, the exhibition organizers had to resort to ChatGPT, capable of producing very realistic texts at high speed, with the aim of establishing in writing an initial description of the architect’s style to then guide the creation. of pictures.
Once this description was obtained, they transferred the text to the Midjourney program, another artificial intelligence that generates images, and from there, it is enough to do some retouching before proceeding to its final download, according to Fajardo.
“We have done what anyone with access to a computer and who is even slightly interested in computing can do. You don’t have to be a specialist to make an request to the AI, ”remarks this Cuban who has lived in Belgium for more than 15 years.
However, the use of artificial intelligence to create new designs does raise, according to Fajardo, a complex debate about the limits of art and “the condition of artist” of the people who, from the keyboard, manage the AI to obtain fictional images.
In this exhibition, a Belgian photographer known under the pseudonym Shango has been in charge of giving artificial intelligence the orders to make works in the Horta style.
Fajardo argues that, in this case, the photographer has performed the role of “curator” and not of artist, since his main task has been to retouch and choose, among the more than 600 images created by the AI, the only ones 30 that have finally been exposed.
Copyright in AI
Copyright is another controversial point in the use of artificial intelligence in the artistic field, since, for example, to design a building as Horta would do, this technology draws on existing content, made both by the architect himself and by other flesh and blood authors.
“If a person recognizes his way of drawing in one of these sketches, can he claim something? And if he claims them, who does he claim? To the AI? To the organizers of the sample? To the person who gave the order to create the image?” Fajardo wonders.
In her opinion, these are “ethical issues” that the exhibition intends to convey to the public, although she warns that, from the organization, they also have many questions and few answers.
What is clear, says Fajardo, is that, for the moment, artificial intelligence “is not infallible”, because, in the preparation of the sample, it has made buildings with stairs that did not lead anywhere, that intersected or went to stop at a wall.
“There are things that AI still hasn’t mastered, and it’s a good thing, but it is perfecting itself,” advises Fajardo, after having verified it in first person, since, once the photographs of the exhibition were printed, he decided to test how a second batch would turn out. images, repeating the same order to the AI.
“The photographs were the same, but with a completely impressive quality, and it brought out new things, much more perfect than what we already have here,” he says.
In any case, the desire of the organizers is to turn this exhibition in Horta into a “laboratory”, and that the project of resuscitating artists grows based on the acceptance that the public gives to artificial intelligence. One of the authors that they already have in their sights is the also modernist architect Antoni Gaudí.