AI’s Unexpected Consequence: Meta, Google and Big Tech Learn to Appreciate Art
Silicon Valley once wasn’t as interested in art as Wall Street and other firms. Now, they’re buying AI art and establishing themselves as the new corporate Medicis.
On an unseasonably warm May afternoon in Manhattan’s bustling Rockefeller Center, the designers Wade Jeffree and Leta Sobierajski stood a few yards in front of a large, colorful sculpture—a “vibrant mirrored maze,” as a nearby placard puts it—that they’d spent the past year building. Billed as a Google Labs Collaboration, the project, per the tech giant, was spurred by the question, “How can generative AI expand the creative process?” Google equipped the Brooklyn-based couple with its latest tool, Whisk, a “generative media experiment… designed for rapid visual ideation,” which the pair then used to help create the structure.
For the tourists traipsing by to behold the enormous work, snap a selfie or spin the fluorescent disc incorporated in the design, AI’s influence in its creation may not have been immediately evident. The two designers, both clad in sunglasses and exuding cool in the sweltering heat, described Whisk as a “third partner” that aided their creative process. “We used Whisk as more of a mood board or helping us with ideation,” Sobierajski explained. “Essentially, our process, along with sketches, was speaking with Whisk, typing in prompts, getting feedback, getting imagery, and using that as a jumping-off point to design something. This design did not immediately come out of the system.”
As much as the project was devised to represent the frontier of AI and art and how they intersect, humans were still the driving force in its ultimate realization, Jeffree made sure to stress. “We had to get to a point where we had to make it for people, and that’s where we had to take over and curate the base idea and then bring it to life: How does it spin? How would a kid use it? How would an adult use it?”
Tech companies are increasingly playing an instrumental role in promoting AI art, as evidenced in partnerships like the one that resulted in the Rockefeller Center sculpture. At the same time, Steve Sacks, who owns bitforms gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, said he has recently been working with some high-profile tech companies on specific purchases and commissions, indicating that there are several players looking to purchase and invest in AI art. (He wouldn’t comment on the specific companies.)