Exploring Art and AI in Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Media, and Communication

Jul 12, 2023 —

An image generated by the DALL-E stable diffusion engine. DALL-E is one of the tools Art & AI students use to exploring the boundaries of AI art.

Painting may seem old school, but it’s a profoundly technological practice. From the tech behind brushes to the mathematics of perspective, artists of all kinds have long placed themselves where science, technology, and art meet. But it’s never been more challenging to pinpoint where a relentless ocean of technology splashes over the ever-shifting sands of artistic expression amid the rise in artificial intelligence tools such as DALL-E and ChatGPT capable of generating images, text, and even music from relatively simple text prompts. This landscape has proven fertile ground for School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) resident painter Mark Leibert, who for years has turned to algorithms and computational methods to help inspire and refine his work. Leibert and collaborators from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have gone even further, recruiting a team of student researchers in the Art & AI Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) to explore the artistic implications of AI and the technological implications of art. In fact, they were well ahead of the recent public buzz over artificial intelligence tools, having launched four years ago — before DALL-E and ChatGPT became household names.