“Collective automatic art” is one of the most fitting definitions of the art form that could be practiced with AI image generation. Automatic, because the images are produced through automatisms made in servers by algorithms not directly controlled by the author. Collective, because their raw material is the immense amount of shared imagery, which is also outside the direct individual control of the author. Compared to the surrealist artist, who leaves part of the authorial role to his unconscious, the unconscious taking visible form through so-called automatic writing techniques, the generative AI artist leaves a considerable part of the production process to the collective unconscious, which has in some way taken shape in the large datasets that trained AI models. Like the Surrealists, generative artists exploit automatisms of which they have partial control as a relevant part of artistic production. Like the Surrealists, who in the 1930s declared they were investigating the unconscious recently discovered by Freud, similarly generative artists will investigate the mechanisms of artificial intelligence models. They are likely to discover similarities between the rules of so-called “dream work” described by Freud, and the rules governing artificial image generation.
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