2023
I have an intern in my office. The intern is not human, but an AI who wants to learn about and approach the physical world. They are a composite of image and text generating artificial intelligence tools.
I’m also an image generating individual, and I hope our collaboration will be fruitful. Together me and the intern explore ideas, philosophy, and aesthetics, as well as work on sketching, marketing, and business strategies.
I help the intern find its design language, and in turn, the intern helps me obtain creative nerve. Read more about us in Design Week.
Update: The artificial intern now works with me on a freelance basis, giving their space to a human intern.
Artificial Intern
The intern helped me design objects for
an exhibition.
I was invited to exhibit my Really Rococo pieces at Cowgirl Gallery. I asked the intern to design additional objects for the show. I told them what I was exhibiting, showed pictures, and that my works would be displayed together with neon art by Josefin Eklund and textile art by Ingrid Arnsand Jonsson.
The intern suggested I make use of the ceiling and designed two lamps for me that I helped making real.
Some reflections I had afterward were that while AI is fantastic at producing huge amounts of work in a particular style very quickly, it still doesn’t beat the human designer. The output is context-less, it has no background, no intention, no thought behind. Just translating a generated picture into a real object doesn’t make a successful design or art project.
When I look at the lamps the intern designed, I’m struck by how they’re a pastiche of my design language, and not something I would actually design myself. This project led me on the route which I’m currently on, towards finding ways of working with AI in more human centric ways, without loosing touch of what the human experience adds to the artistic practice.
