There’s been a lot of recent coverage of AI generated art in the last weeks. Here is some of that coverage that caught my eye.

Tech writer Ben Thompson has written a detailed overview of the changing nature of economics and work in The AI unbundling. He describes the idea propagation value chain in which different technologies – in particular the printing press and the internet – change how communication is propagated along a chain made up of creation, substantiation, duplication, distribution and consumption. According to Thompson, human communication has evolved depending on the location of bottlenecks in this chain. For instance, the printing press removed the bottleneck of duplication and increased “the number of ideas that could be economically distributed.” When it comes to art-making, the last of Thompson’s chain – creation and substantiation – is in the early stages of being removed or altered by AI-generated art.

Here’s an AI generated image using the phrase ‘ethical artificial intelligence in a human body’ from NightCafe.

Mmmmm.

On Aeon.com two recent films have been shared.

The first is a film called Ghosts in which the film’s “trippy shape-shifting visuals” were generated by a neural network programme called StarGAN v2.

The second is a film called Recoding Art that tries to make sense of what AI sees in a contemporary art museum.

And – slightly off-topic – here is an AI generated podcast in which artificial Joe Rogan interviews artificial Steve Jobs.

– Simon Ellis

PS: I couldn’t resist another go at AI-generated image. Here are four images from the phrase ‘dance, movement and the body in society and culture’. It’s fascinating in some respects, particularly how it seems to blend normative tropes of (women in) dance within non-normative figures, bodies and faces.