Testing the limits of generative AI and its capacity for abstraction

Can AI do art? Since 2022, computer scientist Bernhard Egger and artist Hans Furer have been jointly conducting an experiment to test the limits of generative AI and its capacity for abstraction. Prompted by some 800 paintings that Furer had created since 1971, Egger's AI model generated its own images, from which the artist selected five to transfer them again onto canvas as accurate copies of the digital templates. As a reply, he then painted a new version of one of his earlier works, thus entering a dialogue with the AI image.

The book Can AI Do Art? offers Furer and Egger's field notes of their experiment, supplemented with contributions by specialists from the fields of digital art history, creative human-machine collaboration, and law, who shed light on the theoretical foundations of creative artificial intelligence, art-historical contexts, and questions of authorship and copyright. The juxtaposition of the copied AI image with Furer's replies invites a reflection on the fundamentally different orientations of artificial and human intelligence and creativity.