AestheticAI

AestheticAI is a cultural mega-corporation dreamt up by ChatGPT that uses AI to hold a monopoly on the creative industries. It's also a project that aims to explore the role of designers in a new landscape dominated by the rapid rise of Generative AI.

So, what does the future look like for creatives? Within Generative AI the idea of 'model collapse' might hold some clues. It states that AI content will begin to saturate the learning pool for subsequent generations of AI models, and that without 'access to genuine, human-generated content' models will start to collapse, become repetitive or even deranged.

Using the idea of AestheticAI as a blueprint, where artists become the middle, human element for Generative AI to design around, we created a photographic body of work. Using the prompt 'texture' as a starting point, this was to become an experimental dataset to train a generative AI model.

We are presenting this model’s output as a research project into the possibilities and realities of using Generative AI as a tool, highlighting that our engagement with this technology needs to be more than a skin-deep reaction. The audio by Simon Pyke (aka Freefarm) experiments with deepfake voices and AI audio textures juxtaposed with analogue synthesisers, emphasising how we must ensure this technology works for us and not vice versa.

The project culminated in an installation at our London studio and Markers' Yard in Frome. 
 

Collaboratively running the project, Creative Directors Jason Drew and Gary Roberts share their thoughts:

Gary: AI is here to stay and we need to make sure we’re having an analytical discourse about it. We’re constantly being told mixed messages - on the one hand, we’ll see 70% of job losses in the creative industries within the next 2-5 years, and on the other, there’ll be 5 million new jobs in the industry by 2025 - it’s two ends of the spectrum. Whilst it’s unclear where the truth lies at the moment, the only certainty is that the industry is inevitably going to change.

From my experience, the existence of AI has put an emphasis on the soft skills we naturally possess as humans; communication, empathy, the ability to recognise another human’s needs and sensing what’s the right answer. AI can’t replicate this. Being creative is a human right, the seemingly simple act of manifesting something from nothing shouldn’t be taken for granted. The emotive journey we go through when creating a piece of work is so incredibly important to the final output. Our feelings; the way we each perceive an idea or see an image; that lived experience is where our humanity lies. By giving over some of the thinking or making to AI, will it limit our own emotive experience? Are we letting go of some form of our humanity?

Jason: We’ve had an amazing response after sharing this project, and not just because of the output but because of the need to think more deeply about the technology, especially from universities who are trying to grapple with the implications for young designers. We shouldn’t minimise how much impact we can have as designers on our tools; we’re the ones who get to decide its value. It’s up to us to purposely experiment beyond the boundaries of our own taste and comfort zones, to engage with new technologies but to remain critical. We should always be curious, but we should also be thoughtful with that curiosity.