About the Talk:
The use of AI in art making is as old as AI itself. The ways artists integrated AI in their creative process have been evolving with the advances of AI models and their capabilities. What is the value artists find when using AI as part of their process? What is the role of an artist and what is the role of AI in the process? How is that changing now with generative AI being dominated by text prompting as the way of interface? What have we gained and what have we lost with the progress of generative AI taking its course out of the uncanny valley to utility with the introduction of large language models as part of image generation. In this talk I will present my viewpoint about answering these questions as well as feedback from talking to many artists about this issue and trying to understand the ways they have integrated AI in their process.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Ahmed Elgammal is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and an Executive Council Faculty at the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He is the founder and director of the Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers. Dr. Elgammal has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and books in the fields of computer vision, machine learning and digital humanities. Dr. Elgammal is also the founder of Playform AI, a platform for making AI accessible for artists. Dr. Elgammal research on knowledge discovery in art history, AI-art generation, and AI-based at authentication received global media attention, including several reports on the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, NBC, CBS News, Science News, and many others. In 2016, a TV segment about his research, produced for PBS, won an Emmy award. In 2017, he developed AICAN, an autonomous AI artist and collaborative creative partner, which was acclaimed in an Artsy editorial as “the biggest artistic achievement of the year.” AICAN art has been exhibited in several art venues in Los Angeles, Frankfurt, San Francisco, New York City and the National Museum of China. In 2021, he led the AI team that completed Beethoven’s 10th symphony, which received worldwide media coverage. He received M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2000 and 2002, respectively.
