Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 | Warming up to AI in Panjim

At the AI Minilab and other programming at Serendipity Arts Festival, visitors learned first-hand that artificial intelligence isn’t the boogeyman

Walking into the AI Minilab at the just-concluded Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, I was armed with prompts I was dying to ask ChatGPT. The first one: for the chatbot to create a piece of art from its imagination. Very reassuringly, the AI replied that it has no imagination of its own.

It is based, it told me, “on pattern recognition, learned relationships and algorithms... and though AI might be able to produce outcomes that surprise, inspire or resonate, the processes will always be based on human intelligence”.

Mathieu Wothke, the founder of Somewhere Global, a Stockholm-based creative agency that focuses on culture and uses AI-generated art, put together the Minilab as a simple set-up — of six iPads equipped with ChatGPT. The role of accessibility clearly stood out. Visitors could engage in an interactive dialogue with the chatbot and share ideas that it transformed into vivid visuals. From ‘high tech Goa in 3025 with flying cars’ to ‘pink horses’.

Wothke found that while many walked in with some trepidation, they soon had fun making images, the young often showing the elders how to use it. But he tells me with a laugh that none was art. “There is this very interesting fine line of what’s art and what’s not. AI gives everyone the tools to do it, but that doesn’t mean all can do it.”

It brings to mind Refik Anadol, who is planning to open the world’s first AI arts museum, Dataland, in Los Angeles next year. The new media artist, whose interactive digital canvases showcase creations made from colossal datasets — from weather conditions to real-time data from the Amazon rainforest — insists that it is important for artists to build their own AI tools, so that they are co-creating with the machine.

At Serendipity, the last room of the installation highlighted this dichotomy, juxtaposing AI-generated visuals from novices with works crafted by seasoned artists. The differences reveal themselves in the intent, message, and emotional resonance. “It’s the vision, storytelling [and technique] that set art apart from mere production,” explains Wothke.

AI-enhanced technologies and solutions are currently more widely available across industries. Concurrently, it is also pushing up AI anxiety. In the arts, news such as Marvel and Disney deciding to use an AI-generated animated intro for the show Secret Invasion earlier this year, is one of the many instances triggering fear among creatives.