On many occasions the bell has been said to have tolled for art. The end of art was once predicted with the invention of the printing press and, more recently, with the popularization of photography. Now computers have entered the fray and some concerned souls think that the advent of art created with, or by, computers mean the end for artists. In fact, computer-based art is merely a new tool that artists can use to create. And it is one that has exploded the possibility of what art can be. The catchall term for computer-created or altered content is “synthetic media.”

The key is that this content is made or changed in an automated way—a programmer creates and algorithm and the computer then does the work. The term covers all types of data or files, with the implication being that the final product is mean to mislead its audience into thinking that it is “real,” human created. This means that it covers “fake news” and other negatives. But there is a positive side to it when it comes to art. This encompasses NFTs, metaverses, generative art and AI art.

AI art uses computer algorithms to draw from a colossal database of categorized images to create new, unique images based on “prompts” input by the creator. The prompts are in the form of text, for instance “a snapshot of a gallery exhibition opening with a crowd wearing surgical masks gathered around a redhead from a Roy Lichtenstein Ohhh…Alright… series of paintings.” The AI (artificial intelligence) program, Midjourney being one prominent example (along with Dall-e and Google’s Imagen), then conjures up four images based on the prompt. This software permits an unprecedented level of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding.

The creator can ask for a different four images, or can “upscale” one that they like, summoning up a high-resolution version of it, or they can “develop” their preferred image. Developing the image, which I call “generative evolution,” allows the creator to add further prompts to one of the AI images to alter it, leading the AI to prepare a fresh batch of four images based on the initial prompt and the follow up. The AI does nothing without the input of the creator. The more development the creator requests of the AI, the more the creator-as-artist has his or her invenzione in the final image. An example of this is my Midjourney-generated series of flowers inspired by Andy Warhol, which I call Love Machine, part of the “I Want To Be a Machine” exhibit within the metaverse. The flower changes with each generation, the textual input prompts functioning like adding strands of DNA. What began as a simple red flower evolves over the course of hundreds of iterations as I kept adding prompts to develop it further. How it evolves is as much a surprise to the creator as to any future viewer. After enough rounds of development, the AI began to add hearts to the flower and, in what I decided should be the final image, it wrote the word “love.”

The godfather of art history, 16th century painter, architect and biographer Giorgio Vasari, wrote of how artists employ invenzione (invention, imagination, visualizing an artwork before you begin to make it) and disegno (design or drawing, the actual hands-on making of the work you envisioned). When it comes to AI art, the invenzione remains with the creator, but the disegno is handed over to the computer. The creator of the image is still an artist, but instead of commanding a team of real human assistants, as do the likes of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, to actually make the art they envision, AI swaps out the human assistants for Artificial Intelligence. The creator still has to provide the feedback, to supervise, and the artwork is not finished until the creator determines it is. AI is just the tool, an intelligent paintbrush that works through programming rather than skill of hand to enact the will of the artist. It puts the “art” in Artificial Intelligence.

Warhol was once quoted as saying “I want to be a machine.” I took this literally and used AI, alongside my experience with VFXRio creating established and popular virtual metaverses, to brew up a new metaverse that functions as a lunapark (a European term for an amusement park) inspired by the works of Warhol, including exhibition spaces that virtual visitors can explore. I created an avatar called A.I.W4rhol to sign my AI creations. This avatar offers me a chance to express and develop an artistic rupture through researching language and its effect on AI art. All of the art inside and the visuals in this metaverse were prepared by me, via my avatar, using the AI engine Midjourney.

Using Midjourney for the disegno, I filled the lunapark with images developed into objects and spaces that virtual users can enter, view or interact with. One of the exhibits on display in the lunapark metaverse is the aforementioned “I Want To Be a Machine.” The AI software accepted prompts of Andy Warhol’s famous series of painted Brillo boxes, along with his Campbell’s Soup cans, and combined them into cubes. I blew up some to enormous scale within the metaverse so that visitors can virtually walk into them or stand upon them. Atop a giant floating Brillo box is a terrace that has been dubbed Brillo Auditorium. There you can see another exhibit, “Love Machine.” It consists of a series of what appear to be framed lithographs on paper of brightly colored flowers.

And, because anything the programmer chooses can be integrated into the surreal world of a metaverse, you can drive around this exhibit in bumper cars. Another exhibit, “Brillo Box Soup” (a mashup between the Campbell’s Soup and Brillo Box series), is accessed via a cave inside the metaverse which has been called Plato’s Cave Gallery. The metaverse will be ever-expanding, with new exhibits and spaces to explore.

After having spent so many years developing metaverses and contemplating semiotics, I believe that the most important aspect is the user experience. It must be meaningful to players, liberating, inspiring, perhaps even emotional. The term ARG, Alternative Reality Game, best categorizes this. The AI art and the metaverse space, particularly when explored wearing VR goggles, are so realistic that they trick the eye, an effect called trompe l’oeil, into thinking they are real. A lie that reveals the truth—that we can never wholly trust that what we see is real in the sense of existing in our tangible world. In the film, Inception, a character states that “an idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” So it is with AI art. It can feel intimidating, an “end of art,” but it needn’t be. It is a new medium, a harness for the imagination. As the film also states, “If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination.”

Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem wrote a book called The Cyberiad in which he imagined a future populated almost entirely by robots who took over the roles of humans. It was published in 1965, decades before computers became ubiquitous, it was strikingly prescient. One of the characters is Elektrybalt, an “electronic poet” or robot who writes poetry who was created by Trurl, a “wizard robot.” Trurl is referred to as a “constructor” because he can create anything at will, god-like. It was as if Lem had envisioned not only the universal use of robots and machines to take over so many menial jobs traditionally done by humans, but also the AI powers of today’s “electronic poets,” platforms like Midjourney.

The limits in-built to current AI platforms seek to steer users away from the sort of misuse that will inevitably arrive: using AI to create fake news, sex and violence. For instance, in Midjourney you cannot include “blood” as a prompt. But such limitations can be portals of creativity. In 1939, Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a 50,000 word novel, Gadsby, without using the letter “e” within it. Inspired by it, in 1969 Georges Perec wrote La Disparition in French, likewise with “e.” That novel was translated into eight languages with the translators obliged to maintain the e-less-ness. Limitations can force you to give up, or spur you on to more imaginative routes. The limits in AI prompt move the creative process to another level, as it forces you to elaborate on your ideas in alternate ways in order to develop other visuals that can achieve better results.

Semiotics is the study of symbols and their meanings. What I created, with Midjourney’s help, is a layer cake of symbols. It is conveys the original, mass produced products (soup and laundry detergent) as well as the layer of Warhol’s art based upon them, and now provides a third layer, AI-created art based on art based on advertising.

Each image that you craft inside Midjourney holds a cryptographic code and the text is its key. You do not only create an image, but also an atmosphere and a notion of space and time. For example, the clustered reality elements of an old newspaper announcement of “I Want To Be a Machine,” as well as what appears to be a snapshot by a photographer of a group of people at the opening of an exhibit, gathered around a redheaded woman who looks like she’s stepped out of a Roy Lichtenstein painting series. The result of these AI confections is surreal and yet appears very real.

The AI tools process constructs a lucid dream state for its audience. Hypothetically, in the near future, this process may be able to teach machines how to dream. That, one would hope, will lead to a better version of HAL 9000, the infamous computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey designed to mimic human mistakes. What is important now, in the early days of synthetic media, is to educate the public on how to use it in a way that creates meaningful experiences, a movement for beneficent use of VR. It is so powerful since it can change our own perception.