Last year I and Roger collaborated with Dr Jennifer MacRitchie to co-create a series of portraits of dementia with the Sheffield Early Onset Hub (see here for a film featuring members of the hub).
In what is likely a world’s first, we staged an exhibition of images that were the subject of a collaboration between the members of the group, an AI, and the research team. Of the hundreds of images we produced, these were the chosen ones which were professionally printed and mounted for the exhibition.
As well as producing evocative images that we and the group are proud of, the project raises and highlights all kinds of interesting questions about authorship around generative AI. All these images were a collaboration, between everyone in the early onset group, myself and Roger and the research team who were piloting the AI system that generated the images, and the AI itself.
Getting hands on, making images, an exhibiting them, seems a really productive way of seeing how these new challenges ‘feel’, rather than simply researching them in abstract terms.
An interesting realisation was that the moment the images were titled, they somehow felt more personal. This seemed to be moment they stopped being AI ‘slop’ and arguably became artwork.
In the coming months we will continue and extend this work through the recently announced BRIDGES network.
