The Greatest Piece of AI Art

The most profound piece of AI art quietly exposes the pitfalls of AI

There is a lot going on in the field of artificial intelligence these days, so much that I struggle to keep abreast of the latest news and updates. If you’re of a technical bent, I’d recommend following Zvi Mowshowitz’s Don’t Worry About the Vase substack and you’ll never have time for anything else.

I’ve been thinking about and writing about AI for close to a decade and the field has hit an inflection point wherein AI has become either a valuable tool for prototyping and accelerating product development or the demon that is sabotaging our future. Maybe both.

There is one thing that I wanted to put down for the record because it is metaphorically important and, I believe, a hint about the nature of AI and a glance into the future. It is “the greatest piece of AI art yet made".

For those unfamiliar with this piece, this is what an AI did when someone asked it to complete Keith Haring’s achingly tragic work, “Unfinished Painting”.

“Unfinished Painting” is one of Haring’s last paintings before he died from AIDS-related complications at 31 years old. The three mostly complete figures are indicative of Haring’s style of figure painting, which involves expressive but simple human forms in poses of energy and motion.

What makes the AI completion of Haring’s painting such an important piece of art is because there contains, within this completion, a profound message about the nature of AI. It also provokes us to see ourselves in it, our relation to art and AI, and to think about what we find sacred and hold dear.

For the sake of clarity, I’m going to call the AI completion above “Finished”.