Media mogul and coalition of stars join the growing battle over tech firms using creative works to train programs It is an unlikely alliance: the billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and a panoply of leading artists including the Radiohead singer, Thom Yorke, the actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore, and the author Kazuo Ishiguro. This week, they began two very public fights with artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using their intellectual property without permission to build the increasingly powerful and lucrative new technology. Continue reading...

As generative AI advances, it is easy to see it as yet another area where machines are taking over – but humans remain at the centre of AI art, just in ways we might not expect When faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls it Telephone Pictionary; another refers to it as Writey-Drawey. The internet tells me it is also called Eat Poop You Cat, a sequence of words surely inspired by one of the game’s results. As recently as three years ago, it was rare to encounter text-to-image or image-to-text mistranslations in daily life, which made the outrageous outcomes of the game feel especially novel. But we have since entered a new era of image-making. With the aid of AI image generators like Dall-E 3, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, and the generative features integrated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud programs, you can now transform a sentence or phrase into a highly detailed image in mere seconds. Images, likewise, can be nearly instantly translated into descriptive text. Today, you can play Eat Poop You Cat alone in your room, cavorting with the algorithms. Continue reading...

For his explosion event in Los Angeles, Cai Guo-Qiang built his own version of ChatGPT and employed a drone army to answer the question: what is the fate of humanity and AI? For decades, Cai Guo-Qiang has been the world’s foremost fine artist of explosions. He is famous for his massive fireworks displays, from his glowing footsteps in the sky at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to his 2015 Sky Ladder, a 1,650-foot flaming ladder to heaven featured in a Netflix documentary. Recently, the gunpowder artist has become obsessed with a new threatening technology: artificial intelligence. Continue reading...

As debate rages around the ethics and legalities of artificial intelligence, artists are exploring the technology’s possibilities – and its precarities Cate Blanchett – beloved thespian, film star and refugee advocate – is standing at a lectern, addressing the European Union parliament. “The future is now,” she says, authoritatively. So far, so normal, until: “But where the fuck are the sex robots?” The footage is from a 2023 address that Blanchett actually gave – but the rest has been made up. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

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The performance artist and ‘sex clown’ shares her list of (mostly) wholesome clips: the cutest children, the best dog and the glitziest aerobics workout * Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email I am a person who believes in laughter. I work in live art. My main medium is performance. In art-making I revere legacies of border-riders, defiant sexualities, witches and rascals. I have been known as a sex clown and I am proud to invoke laughter. Some of the best laughing is out of absurdity. Laughter erupts and massages. Purrs and murmurs. It erodes calcified, rational, top-down thinking. It appears mysteriously, sometimes even when we think we should not laugh. My grandmother Betty used to say to my brother and I: “You’re laughing now, you’ll be crying in a minute!” We need our tears and hope; I wouldn’t be laughing so hard if it wasn’t so deeply serious. Continue reading...

The forthcoming game is a nostalgic exploration of a city in summer. Its creative director explains how it helps players to feel they are making the world more beautiful How do you make painting fun for those without an artistic bone in their body? Game developers have come up with a few answers – or at least, they’ve tried. There’s the straightforward approach of something like Mario Paint, where players are handed a mouse accessory and creation tools similar to Microsoft Paint. In Ōkami, a painter’s brush is used as a weapon and a magic wand in a Zelda-like world. In The Unfinished Swan, the world (and the story) are gradually revealed by the player’s spattered ink. Forthcoming painting game Été is less about the process of making art on a canvas, and more about making players feel as if they are making the world more beautiful. It lets you make art without any of the friction. “Like lots of games, Été fulfils a fantasy through role playing, the fantasy of being a painter – and to do so, we assume your avatar is already a talented painter,” says creative director Lazlo Bonin. “Painting in Été is not about skill, it’s about creativity and enjoyment.” Été is out on PC on 23 July. Continue reading...