Creative Symbiosis with AI

The question about the authenticity of artworks created by AI can only be answered by identifying the new role of the artist in the face of artificial intelligence. The contemporary artist today is no longer alone: the AI is an “other” with whom he or she collaborates. As in Surrealism or twentieth-century creative automatism, today the artist using artificial intelligence relinquishes control over the work in favour of processes of which they are not fully aware and in some way “unconscious.” Yet if we take for example the Surrealist painter, who entrusts part of the creative process to his individual unconscious, the artist using generative AI entrusts a substantial part of the generative processes of the work to the global technological network. Generative AI creates images from huge databases of images, sounds, videos, texts, behaving as a new kind of universal mind, modeled on a “collective unconscious. The user interacts through textual prompts, which are translated into “latent space”-an artificial dimension where technological image generation takes place. The vastness of iconography available and the speed of the production process provide the artist with a tool incomparable to any technique every seen.